Dark Individual said:
I love it because there's a really strong focus on your hero. It's almost an RPG. You need several missions to completely build up your character and, no matter which skill you choose, you will become distinctively more powerful.
The idea was good, but the implementation was half-assed. Having a melee or archery hero on the battlefield in just ridiculous when you think about it: how can one guy swinging a sword take out 93 pixies? Does he swing 93 times? When they retaliate, do the remaining 247 strike him in turns, each chipping away 0.08 of a HP? Same goes for archery. How many arrows can that poor hero carry? Is it normal that in a game in which all archers have limited shots one guy can shoot a torrent of unlimited volleys?
The different specialist classes gained from mixing your skillset can get pretty useless as well because of the completely inane bonuses you get from them. Great, I took a higher level of Chaos Magic and now I am no longer a Battle Mage, which has some beefed up spells, but a Fireguard, which makes me resistant to fire, which is fucking useless since as a spellcaster I'm not sending my hero to the front lines anyway to get fried.
Above all, the combat system favours heroes too much, especially with you being able to have as many of them in your party as you want. In that respect, the game is closer to M&M than to HoMM - the bad part, of course, being that in M&M you didn't fight entire armies at once, only a small group or a mob at most. So much for consistency within the setting.
What HoMM4 did very well, though, is the actual skill system (ignoring the classes you get, even though they were a good idea in theory). It was the best in the series up to that point, to bad that HoMM5 completely outdid it.
Love the graphics as well because it is one of the very, very few games with realistically designed units and, something which shouldn't go unnoticed, real armor with no shoulder pads! It looks better than HoMM 5, King's Bounty or any other 3D Strategy/RPG as they always turn out having ridiculous human models with huge arms and retarded looking armor.
That's entirely subjective. I'm glad you like the art style, and the lack of shoulder pads is a plus, but the graphics always looked very sterile to me. I think that HoMM1/2/3/5 look infinitely better, especially since the semi-cartoony art style used in them has always been present.
Text. There's a lot of it if you play the campaign. Whenever you advance, you're rewarded with enjoyable bits of the story's progression. Combined with the graphics, the game has a very pleasant atmosphere to it devoid of idiotic cut scenes that try to look "badass".
This is true. The campaigns were enjoyable, the storylines were captivating and the lack of any clichéd "save the world" plot (well, except for the one with the half-dead guy, but that was done very sublimely) only helps. Voice acting was top-notch too.
In the intro there are 2 heroes from HoMM 3 fighting. You would expect acrobatics, fireballing and hot elves in bikini armor. Nope, they just clash their swords together which causes an apocalypse. There's also an angel shown doing surprisingly non "badass" things; he's simply rescuing some farm girl who becomes a a ruler in the new world. Here's the Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Sy7qkk ... re=related
Yes, it's a very modest game, but then again so was HoMM3 in the concept art backgrounds. In Shadow of Death, there's an image of an undead army aproaching a human one - no nonsense, no flashiness, just two armies about to hit each other with pointy sticks until more of one side is left standing.
As a personal preference, when I started it up for the first time after upgrading to 128 Mb of RAM to run it, back in the day, I hated seing Gelu bite the dust just like that. He was one badass mofo in HoMM3, second only to Solmyr, the flamboyant Djinn. He exists.
Now for some real drawbacks of HoMM4:
- Reboot of the world. Goddam it, I hate it when they do this. HoMM5 did it too FUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
- Town defences are horrible. Two stumps that serve as towers and a small stream of urine masquerading as a moat?
- City types were reduced to just 6, and number of units per city were reduced even more from 7 + 7 upgrades in HoMM3 to 8 total units, no upgrades, and being able to choose only 5 of them per castle, because the two tier 2, 3 and 4 units can't coexist. This is shit. Thank god for HoMM5 reverting this sacrilege and even compensating for HoMM4 by adding a
second branch of upgrades for each unit in ToTE.
- Fewer spells and very unimaginative ones at that.
- Armies without heroes. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
- The expansions were weak, judging by the list of things added. I haven't played them, so I can't give an informed opinion, but the release notes didn't make me enthusiastic at all.
- The town armies lacked any kind of focus and seemed like just random ideas from the clueless devs. "Hey, Joe, what should we put as creatures for the Nature town? Oh, I know! Wolves, pixies, white tigers and faerie dragons!"
Good parts:
- Caravans were the best idea that HoMM4 produced. So good, in fact, that they decided to bring it back in HoMM5's first expansion.
- The music is phenomenal. Like I posted in the awesome music thread, this game has fucking classical arias and duets for town themes.
- Good campaigns.
- Some familiar heroes survive into this world. Crag Hack and Fafnir come to mind.
- Skill wheel was superior the previous instalments, like I mentioned above.
- Giving personal spellbooks to spellcasters was logical and useful.
All in all, it's a good game but it's the worst one in the series in my opinion. The main problem is that it got too ambitious and ended up changing too many things, a lot of those things being staples of the franchise.
