French PC Games (March 2011 issue)We’ve been allowed to play through the introduction map, which represents more than 2 hours of games. Black Hole developers aren’t fools and they didn’t change the game fundamentals that much. Heroes 6 is still a turn-based strategy game mixed with RPG elements (…)

Resources :
Though they still brought some changes to the game. First of all, the economic part of the game has been simplified : no more 7 resources, instead there are only 4 – the crystal being the only rare resource. This change makes the game pace much faster and more nervous.

In previous Heroes, you were paying special attention to the most important resource of your factions – which wasn’t always the same than your neighbors’. It could be fun to deprive your opponent from a mine as much as it could be somewhat useful to have some extra resources, but it was mostly a waste of time since you had other priorities.

In Heroes 6, each resource is becoming capital. Gaining access to them before an opponent or even stealing them from him can be a step towards victory. War is everywhere now. Likewise, the times you were blocked in previous Heroes because you were lacking sulfur or gems are over. Everything goes faster, almost without a break. (…)

Skills :
Special powers gained through the reputation system are a complement to the new way of managing your heroes in Heroes 6. Out with the semi-randomness and its choice among 2 or 3 skills every level, randomly picked in a list based on your class. Now, each hero has a skilltree in which he can spend talent points. Some skills are based on your reputation choice, some others on your class and some others on your faction. Spells are integrated in this system and don’t require the building of a magic guild to be learnt.

Some general skills are also bringing some advantages out of combat. Some will let you earn more experience (learning), some will give you better chance to recruit creatures (diplomacy) and some other will allow a hero to spend no movement point when picking up resources, accessing a building or entering a town (Snatch)

Combat :
Fights appear to be much clearer and strategic than before. Thanks to a change to the initiative system among other things. Each stack on the battlefield, be it yours or your opponent’s ones, will act one after the other, in an order that can change through the fight. This should balance fights and avoid one player being able to slaughter the other player before he can even act.

There aren’t many big changes, but we’ve noticed that the magic in Heroes 6 was quite weaker than in Heroes 5.

Through fights, you must be careful and use the right unit at the right time, beware from ranged units, regeneration/heals effects and other bad surprises like flying units. It’s very tactical and battle will rarely be an easy job ! Also the AI is already quite decent.

Another good point : fights versus bosses, like in MMORPG. Bosses are huge monsters with huge amounts of hitpoints and special abilities that you’ll fight with your whole army. They are a good training for you to learn how to manage your troops or … not to get too attached to your superb stack of 999 shiny knights who will explode within the first turn of the fight !

There’s still a very bad point though about the city sieges which let us a very bad taste. Getting close to the walls before they fall is so costly in numbers of units that a siege is either suicidal or plain boring. Sieges look more like skirmishes between ranged units with the occasional help of a catapult and from time to time an offensive spell. It might be different at higher level, but in the limited preview we tested, it was plain boring to wait in front of a wall while our units were getting slaughtered.


Conclusion :
Heroes 6 is already very appealing and is at least as good as Heroes 5, but we know that Ubisoft still has some surprises that await us. We’ll of course wait for the 5th faction reveal in March (…)

Also no information about multiplayer has been revealed yet. Will Black Hole use some ideas from Kingdoms or use the basic multiplayer format from previous games ? Answers in several weeks …