I like the Heroes VI loading screens

I played through hours of the Might & Magic Heroes VI demo today and yesterday, managing to formulate some new opinions about the game that I did not have when I had previously played the beta. If you are looking for background and basics for Heroes VI, check out my previous preview. Nevertheless, here is a short overview of the game. Heroes VI is a tactical turn based rpg that has a plethora of depth. There is a story based campaign that takes you through the tale of four or five different characters, each showing off the different races of the game. They have a somewhat persistent online mode that tracks your characters stats, levels up your profile (though I'm not sure what that does) and has persistent items that you may obtain. The persistent items are pretty neat, they level up through using them in matches and you can assign them to whomever before each match. The gameplay is about having a town that you develop through several tiers, purchasing units from that town, protecting that town and exploring the map in order to develop your character into a stronger character than the other enemy players. You can have many hero characters, but each town only lets you recruit a specific growth based amount of units each week, so amassing heroes isn't necessarily for the best. Heroes VI is the newest in the line of M & M Heroes games and it aims to bring back hope to the series after the semi-failure of Heroes V. It is developed and published by Ubisoft, so it utilizes the UPlay system.

There is a demo on steam right now and it is very similar to the beta, except oddly with less content. The demo has a skirmish map, and two campaign levels, the same campaign levels as the beta, except the beta had more campaign levels, multiplayer for the skirmish map and some of the persistent online elements. The demo definitely runs better than the beta did, graphics seem a bit more optimized and the races seem more fully fleshed out. The skirmish map is a large map, with six player spots, and allows you to pick any of the five races: Undead, Beastmen, Humans, Naga and Inferno. I spent most of my time in the demo trying out the Undead and the Beastmen, two races previously unavailable in the beta. The Undead are pretty fantastic, while they are not overly strong, they have a lot of interesting destructive and healing powers. The Beastmen on the other hand are all about strength and support, they have many abilities that hinder enemies. The one skirmish map is dauntingly large at first, especially when you have no idea where the other five players are, but there are plenty of aggressive npc's between towns to keep you safe for a few weeks. Another new thing in the demo was full access to towns, before they had it capped at tier 2, but now you can build seemingly everything and try out every unit. When you upgrade towns they cosmetically change on map, but no longer is there a town screen that shows each individual building, something that many fans of the old Heroes games miss.

A look at the Undead Settlement

Heroes VI is a solid game, one that has a lot of depth, many customization options and much to explore. It's a game that is addictive and one that finally adds some kind of persistent element that rewards you for playing  the campaign and multiplayer. This is also a challenging game, even on the normal difficulty, the AI are good at murdering eachother and doing surprise attacks on your towns. This is one of those few games that you can say will at the very least be a good game, at it's core everything is fun and enjoyable, but we will see if it becomes acclaimed among gamers and critics. The demo is available on steam and game will be coming out on October 13th for PC only with a price tag of $50. If you want to see some more info check out the steam page or the main website. Thanks for reading.
Main Website: http://might-and-magic.ubi.com/heroes-6/en-GB/home/
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/48220/

-Written by Sean Cargle