Review: Heroes of Might and Magic VI

For $10 on Steam, I decided to pick up number 6 in the series.  Steam is a Valve product and they have always treated us gamers with fairness.  Yet this game is a UBIsoft product and they have their own DRM.  So, though comfortable within the walls of our Steam, we are ejected into the unfamiliar territory of UPlay.  On installing and setting up an account, one "Needs" a brand new DRM to play this game.  'Well it had better be worth it', you say grudgingly as it takes you through the hoops to get validated. 

For everything you knew about Heroes 5...get ready for a brand new (and much less intuitive) set of rules.  They needlessly changed EVERYTHING and made it MUCH WORSE than EVER BEFORE!  Do you want to look like a knight and be called a wizard?  Learn spells and not know until much later how terribly you have POOCHED your character?  You get NO tutorial for ANYTHING.  They dropped you off like a babe in the woods with some of the worst voice acting you have ever heard blathering on about some pointless shit.   It looks to me like the design team had A TON OF IDEAS...and not too many of them any good!  They swept all these ideas up and shoved them into the HEROES 6 receptacle of product...along with a few apple cores and banana peels.  When it came time to actually sort and select...some community college project manager said "Oh hell...it's all good enough".   This is ALWAYS what happens when a big company absorbs an excellent product.  Microsoft did it with the MechWarrior series. 

New World Computing was the founding company for this franchise.  They were absorbed by 3DO and eventually the series was passed to UBIsoft.  I hadn't realized Ubisoft was so large.  All I remember them doing were those Tom Clancy type games where you either shot first or had to reload.  I figure if you are going to want to shoot a firearm and have realistic results...and the results coming back at you were to be realistic as well...a reload is better than a funeral. 

Heroes of Might and Magic 6 is an insult to the series and a testament to how badly a big company can pooch a product.  Give it a miss.  3/10