Replaying Heroes of Might and Magic 2
So I got the flu a couple of weeks back, and as I sit there trying to fill my days with Youtube, I stumble across this one talking about fheroes2, an open source recreation of Heroes of Might and Magic 2:
Heroes 2 is a game I got for Christmas of 1996. I was 14 and had just gotten a new PC and internet 10 days prior.
Heroes 2 was a game that meant so much for me the next couple of years. On its own it was a great strategy game, but it also helped me bond with my friends over a game of Hot Seat. Me and my best friend were playing this game for thousands of hours the next years, until Heroes 3 came out.
I also joined with the Heroes community on IRC (Undernet) as the first English speaking internet community I ever was a part of. I don't have contact with any of those people anymore, but it was some good times.
I also remember spending half a year finishing the campaigns of the original game, and never beating the campaigns of the expansion pack, Price of Loyalty.
Well, I decided to give the campaigns a try.
First I did the Evil campaign, which was surprisingly easy. I still remembered how to cheese the final map by carrying over an army from the previous mission, though Roland went a bit heavy on summoning elementals, so it was still a tight battle.
Good campaign next. Nothing too hard, but final map turned out to be an even bigger puzzle, as Archibald had too big of an army for me to beat when I got there.
I ended up having to recruit a hero with navigation skills to get me there quicker, which was just enough for me to be able to capture the castle without taking the map the long tired way.
Price of Loyalty expansion pack next, I started with the titular campaign, which turned out to be easier than anticipated. At least until the very final map, which now, thanks to an improved AI who have learned to combine troops and use Dimension Door, kept taking all my cities with 800 bone dragons after just two weeks. Unwinnable? Seemingly... so I unfortunately gave up, and went on to the next one...
Voyage Home was a much quicker and dare I say easy campaign, with only 4 maps (final one being two alternate versions of the same, and you can only play one). I went the evil path and managed to win quick and easy. This one was alot of fun, possibly my favorite one!
Descendants next, another long campaign, and while certainly not as easy as Voyage Home, it wasn't too much of a challenge either. The final map had a lot of hide-and-seek gameplay with tough heroes, but the thing with Heroes is, once the snowball rolls in either direction, it's very hard to stop, so if you play aggressive from the start, winning is just a matter of time.
Now, the next campaign was called Wizard's Isle, the second of the Mini Campaigns, and this was so much fun!
I can't even remember anything from the first couple of maps. They were fine and cool, but the final one was an adventure on a different level!
I even had to restart it because I got wiped after 3 weeks on my first try, by a teleporting hero with a stack of doom. Familiar?
Turns out, on my second go, that never happened, because it seems like the spells the enemy starts with, is randomized.
Dimension Door just lets you teleport all over, and its perhaps the most broken spell in the game - at least in the early game.
Had I just been unlucky on the previous campaign Price of Loyalty?
I had to give it another go!
Turns out I had been somewhat unlucky, though at the very end of the map here, the bad guy still had Dimension Door, he just never left his home turf!
And with a stack of almost 2000 Bone Dragons against my 100 Titans, I never had a chance. He would just catch up with me and murder me. I town portaled away and was just about to give up, when he escaped his homelands in a boat, and went straight towards my main city.
I panicked, knew I had one shot at this. So I sent my main guy back there, avoiding his hero. Landed, took his towns. And as he was about to return, I put a guy on the teleporter, blocking him off. The strip of land is just far enough away for Dimension Door to not work, so he went back into the ship to head towards my main town.
But as I moved the guy from the teleporter, he disembarked again.
The AI was stuck in a loop!
I kept moving the guy into the teleporter, then back, a couple of turns, until finally, I won!
Can I recommend Heroes 2?
Absolutely! The fheroes2 recreation requires the original game(which is available on GoG if you don't have the CDs), it has smooth HD graphcis and some QoL improvements, like creature managements and quick combat.
The game has aged gracefully, and in my opinion looks better than Heroes 3 does, thanks to the hand drawn colorful 2D graphics.
Its a timeless and fun strategy game that triggers that "one more turn" feel, and while the expansion pack suffers from some balancing issues (like the final campaign map being much more difficult than intended), the base game is still a solid experience!
It kept me entertained during 3 weeks of the flu!