Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes was a brilliant pocket-sized strategy-RPG for the Nintendo DS. It's puzzle-based combat, combined with an interesting story, and deep role playing system, was perfect entertainment on the go. Clash of Heroes is a game that truly deserves a bigger audience and PSN/XBLA provides the perfect platform for it.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes really does pay tribute to the heritage from Japanese strategy-RPG's. The story could have been taken straight out of a game such as Fire Emblem, a young generation of heroes of a quest for revenge and to save the world. It's been cleverly split into five campaigns, each with a new theme, perfect for gaming on the go, but perhaps not ideal for longer gaming sessions in the couch. The campaigns are, however, tied together with a overarching storyline, but it's still a design choice that perhaps is better suited to a handheld game.

At the core of the gameplay experience we find the puzzle-based battles. You equip a set of three standard units, in the first campaign these can be composed of pixies, hunters and bears, each of these units take up a square on the battlefield and they come in three colours. A matched set of three or more same coloured units in a horizontal line builds a wall, while a matched set of three in a vertical line creates an attack. That's the basic principle that governs battles in Clash of Heroes. But when you add in elite units, champions units and their special abilities the depth of it all is almost overwhelming.

Thankfully, the tutorials on hand are brief and to the point. Using techniques such as chaining together moves and fusing attacks soon becomes vital to winning battles, but instead of relaxing players into a rhythm where you feel comfortable on how to achieve the maximum amount of damage and win battles the game constantly challenges you with specific variations on battles. Sometimes you have to defend something, while other battles will see you trying to string two or three attacks together to hit specific targets. There are almost no easy or dull battles in the game, and that's something that really sets it apart from other RPG's.

What makes it so interesting is the amount of different tactics you can use. Just switching your three basics unit types around provides one layer of strategy. Then you have to pick which elite or champion units you want for the battle. You level up all of them so it might be wise to switch things around a bit just to level all units up in order to have for specific purposes further into the campaign. Champion units present a challenge as they take up four squares and require four units placed behind them in order to start charging for their attack. On the other hand they can be extremely useful. One example for the first campaign are the treants, they surge forward with the roots causing a lot of damage initially, but they also that health points from the enemy that replenishing your own hero's health for several rounds. If you equip an artefact that also boosts the efficiency of treants they are extremely useful in some of the longer battles.

And obviously all the stuff I mentioned is great to keep in mind when defending. Breaking up and disrupting the enemy's plans of attack is key to victory. If for instance he has lined up a few chained attacks it can be a good strategy to use some of your quicker units to mount an attack to disrupt one or two of the charging attack rows.

The end result is a battle system that really forces you to think, and if you fail a specific battle it's usually not because you aren't of a high enough level, but usually it's all about adapting your strategy and having another go.

You can trace the handheld roots of the game in the way the story is presented as well. The dialogue is kept reasonably short, and even if there is quite a lot of story to take in, there are never any long cutscenes or neverending conversations to endure. And to be honest you wouldn't want it any other way, the balance between story and and action is just right.

There are traces of the handheld heritage I could have done without. The maps have been broken down in sections with load times in between, something that feels a bit weird considering the power Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 houses. Surely it could have been optimised better.

There aren't a lot of titles on PSN or XBLA that offers this kind of experience. There is a certain weight and depth to the game that you don't often find in downloadable, but Clash of Heroes still manages to be very accessible without sacrificing any degree of challenge. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes offers up a great deal of lasting appeal. The single player campaigns each take a handful of hours to complete (depending on your skill level) and on top of that there is multiplayer for players who seek an even tougher challenge than the in-game enemies.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes made a transition from handheld to home that we rarely see and it's a good thing it made its way over. With a rich world, an engaging battle system, well designed tasks and heaps of variation in combat, it stands out as a definite purchase for fans of the genre.