1 Like Enough with these nonsensical RTS afterbirth games already, go back to full-on Might & Magic RPG's already! Xeen-style!
Might & Magic Heroes VI - Shades of Darkness Review
Might & Magic Heroes VI: Shades of Darkness is a harsh challenge, but not often a fair one.
The Good
- Tons of new content, with two lengthy campaigns and added units
- Same compelling franchise formula, boosted by new stealth options
- Dark fantasy graphics lend the game a fittingly somber tone.
The Bad
- Varying difficulty traps you into replaying big sections of levels
- Offers few surprises to M&M Heroes VI veterans
- Bugs can cause you to force quit the game and lose progress.
Might & Magic Heroes VI: Shades of Darkness is as addictive as it is annoying. This standalone expansion for the 2011 turn-based tactical role-playing game will lure you in with its compelling combat and gorgeous artwork, but push you away with its intense difficulty and bugs. Shades of Darkness clearly needed more time in development, both to smooth out some issues with the over-the-top challenges presented in the new campaigns, and to stomp out the bugs that make the game even tougher to play.
At the heart of this standalone expansion is a pair of new campaigns focusing on the darker side of the Might & Magic Heroes world. Events unfold in the fantasy realm of Ashan about a century after those in the original Might & Magic Heroes VI. In one, you take on the role of Raelag, a dark elf prince fighting to unite warring clans and ensure the survival of his underground-dwelling new Dungeon faction against the machinations of the Necromancers of Necropolis. In the other, you play Vein, a death knight working with the Necropolis faction. There's plenty of convoluted lore, which references black dragons, the goddess Malassa, some creeps known as the Faceless, and so forth, but you can (and perhaps should) safely skip the cutscenes and just skim the rather dense text without missing anything important. Very little of the campaigns' stories matters to what happens in battle, and the overenunciated voice acting is highly cartoonish, making the plot feel more like overzealous window dressing than a tale worth telling.
Nothing in the two campaigns is particularly noteworthy for series veterans. There is an assortment of new, predictable units with the Dungeon faction, along with new heroes and new artifacts to equip. The new stealth abilities are nifty, especially if you have a good stack of dark elf assassins in your army, as they can deliver devastating attacks at the start of battles due to their invisibility talent. But aside from stealth, nothing significantly alters gameplay. Both the campaign structure and map design are similar to what has come before.
One way in which Shades of Darkness excels is its reliance on the darker side of fantasy. You guide evil factions loaded with the likes of vampires, ghouls, assassins, and floating octopi, and mysterious visual touches on main maps and battle scenes make these entities come to eerie life. Even watching your Necromancer troops scream in triumph after battles is chilling. The mixture of these evildoers and their underground lands and the traditional brighter color palette of the above-ground Might & Magic world of Ashan is striking.
Varying difficulty is a significant source of frustration. Maps are loaded with encounters, giving you a lot to explore and kill. Most battles are easy to win in the early stages, which helps you sink your teeth into what Shades of Darkness has to offer. But it's all a trap. This early easy difficulty sets up an illusion that you're rolling along nicely, mopping up the bad guys while sustaining seemingly acceptable losses. But in reality, the later-map battles are so tough that you can't afford to lose anybody along the way. Even trivial- or low-rated foes tend to take out at least a few of your troops before their dirt naps. So if you take on a lot of encounters, your losses add up quickly.
58 comments
1 Like 
2 Like European developers tend to confuse strategy with puzzles. They design maps/levels/scenarios so there's one way to complete it and if you do anything else you lose. It almost always means you lose on the first try until you figure out the trick. Good strategy games allow different methods to succeed - speed, building a huge army, turtling, etc.
2 Like This guy needs to go play Shadow of Death - HoMM expansions have always been pretty grueling. I'm getting a bit tired of "it's too hard for me!" being counted as a negative against game design. From what he described, this sounds more challenging than broken, and he probably just needs to learn to play better. Bugs are another thing - but from the sounds of it, it's just one issue with a particular system setup. Anyone run into anything else?
1 Like Gah! When will we ever get a Heroes worthy of the old renowned games that was Heroes I-III, these days they can't even balance the difficulty *sob*
I finished both campaigns in this edition and there was one map I had to start three time to beat it. I had pre-ordered the game when it was released I couldn't find where to download it from. I sent a e-mail to Ubisoft that had yet to be anwsered. I found out how to download the game on the forum. The difficulty playing the skirmishes alone is damn near impossible. I haven't been able to win one yet.
One of the worst launched games and took them a year to fix it up to what should have been decent enough launch title. Ubisoft treated this like EA treated SWTOR, they just don't give a crap and wanted extra cash coming in.
It would be great if H3 was just remade with these graphics, or even 5.
@Master_Vexov umm i don't know on what version you're playing
but the gog.com version has full compatibility and they improve the textures of the game
plus who the hell plays a game for it's graphics???
This game is buggy. I started the second mission with my hero (Raelag) reset to lv 1! He started mission 1 at lv 5...! All my reputation, artifacts, and stat points gone.
1 Like @lostn heroes vi is pretty shit, so just search in youtube for the cutscenes (cause the story is amazing) and just play heroes 5 or 3
6 is the worst, i'ed take 4 anyday over this piece of shit
@thequickshooter @lostn Did they eventually implement town screens? That was the single largest oversight of the vanilla game.
@thequickshooter @lostn I think the game had potential. Way more than 4 did. The graphics are nice, and most of the gameplay refinements are great. But the bugs! And the difficulty was frustratingly impossible.
2 Like I bought the original Heroes VI game and it too is unfairly difficult. It is because you cannot develop troops without attacking, and you can't develop troops if you you're too weak to attack. It's a circular mechanism that is at odds with strategy. Also, the CPU manages to build up whatever and whenever it wants.
1 Like bought the complete edition on steam... its a complete disaster, too many bugs even in the original campaign that was released almost 3 years ago!, not to mention the online DRM :S. its a waste of 50$.
@botroo3 Listen, happened to me with Diablo III (not so long ago but still) now I download games illegally and if I like the game than I buy it, this way I don't waste money and I support the good companies. you should do the same :/
2 Like @botroo3 Origin, Uplay, GFWL. I don't know what disaster plafform will appear next? Steam is fa mor stable than those sh*t combined. At least Ubisuck puts their games on Steam for God 'sake. As much as I like to buy from EA (sometime),Origin prevented me from doing that ("Great" download speed).
2 Like @Master_cheat001 @botroo3 gog is the way to go.. now if only there were more games released there
1 Like I like all the Heroes games, and I guess I don't really have a favourite. They're all good in my book.
Beat the game and did not run into any bugs. Game can be hard as heck though. Nearly impossible to beat some maps on the first playthrough.
New faction is okay , combat animations for some of the units seem are a bit off though. Overall i liked it.
8 Like The Heroes series ended for me when Sandro the Necromancer became a side character and subsequently removed.
1 Like It's a 30$ DLC that, according to Steam forums, is completely broken and unplayable. How we are getting "more than our money's worth" is beyond me, even if it were functionnal.
@thequickshooter I generally just pretend that all HoMM titles after the fourth don't exist. After NWC closed its doors, M&M games just aren't the same thing. I just hope M&M X returns this once great IP to its origins.
1 Like @dark_sith_ actually heroes V is pretty damn awesome
the campaign have novel like story and it's not just conquer this and conquer that
it has a great story filled with many emotions
the magic system is way better then 3 and they made the online much more fluid
it's one the damn best heroes games in existence and completely shits all over heroes 4
@ggregd @thequickshooter @dark_sith_
provided they were from the same nation
the negetive moral you'ed get for mixing troops is just unfair
@thequickshooter @dark_sith_ I always though Heroes 4 was too easy because of the OP heroes on the battlefield. You could forget troops and have 4 heroes in your army and destroy anything you come up against.
yeah i miss those text boxes of how did you get an artifact
especially heroes 4 text boxes, for they were pleasant to read
the art style is a bit off but it's ok by any means
the campaign is much better, heroes 3&4 campaign were insanely difficult
the story is great, it's actually more understand able since the world of ashen (heroes 5) has a proper time line >> http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes5/timeline.shtml
@thequickshooter @dark_sith_ As a matter of fact, I'm just now playing Heroes V. Again. Game mechanics are good. No question there. But the game somehow feels stripped to me. Gone are all those little touches from previous titles. Colours look drab in comparison to HoMM III and IV. No more little blocks of descriptive text when you find some item or a chest. Not to mention that the new world is nowhere near as interesting as those that came before. It is a good game, but not as immersing as previous titles.
@thequickshooter uhmm how about NO... already have 2 copies of all might and magic games even 3 of 2 of them
2 Like @enartloc @thequickshooter Agreed! These guys are one of the last remaining companies that actually see the customer as a person and not a fat wallet to suck dry, they truly deserve all the support they can get.
Ubisoft realized that they can't casualize the mechanics of this game so they just release a crap version to milk the last bits from the fans, oh well.
3 Like I'd like to know what version of this game the Reviewer played. Whether it was the actual released 1.8 version, or the 2 gig patch 2.1. The reason I bring that up is because games here on Gamespot and in general, reviews are supposed to be based on the first release of a game. I remember when Heroes 6 came out and Gamespot took almost 3 weeks to review it, which by then several patches had already came out....Just wondering is all. And if you're a Heroes 3 fan such as myself, you'd of enjoyed Heroes Chronicles.
@n0xinab0x Heroes Chronicles is an awesome set of games. Wish someone would roll out high resolution mod like the one for Heroes III
2 Like You can clearly see that reviewer, as 90% of the time on this site, doesn't know what he is talking about. Since when "few suprises" are a bad thing? CoD has no suprises and yet you all beat off to it, or rather paycheck.
Also, difficulty? The guy didn't play HoM&M 6 for sure, because there you also had to replay missions to have a chance, and some of them were pretty long and hard as shit, and yet he writes it like it has been added now. And "Might & Magic Heroes"? What the hell, no, what the fuck does that even mean? It should've been "Might and Magic" world, because Might and Magic and Heroes share the same world, history, timeline or whatever you want to call it. And it's an EXPANSION, so what did you expect, aside from new castle and few tweaks?
Also "Take on too many foes, and you lose the war of attrition; take on too few, and you wind up not gaining enough experience and missing out on artifacts that have a huge impact on powering up your hero" well, sounds like Heroes VI to me. So yeah, he didn't even played it. Is that a good thing that the game is hard? According to Gamespot they don't even know, because there was no mention about it in the VI review.
3 Like @PeterDuck I liked the fourth one as well. While it wasn't as good as III it still retained the great aspects of the previous titles while trying to innovate. I'd recommend Disciples 2 also. That was an awesome game too.
2 Like @dark_sith_ @PeterDuck Agreed. IV wasn't as good as the others, but it was still enjoyable and at least it tried to do something different. Disciples II is a great game as well. Haven't tried Disciples III yet, but I hear that was pretty bad?
1 Like Don't buy Disciples III, it's one of the worst games I've ever played. Try King's Bounty in case you haven't yet
1 Like @idontlivehere11 @dark_sith_ @PeterDuck That game is abysmal. Don't waste your time and money on Disciples III. I rushed to buy it, and it was one of the worst game purchases of my gaming history.
4 Like @PeterDuck Ok, I hate to be that guy but I have to say that HoMM5 with all xpacks was still pretty damn good. I would even argue it was almost as good as or just as good as 3, albeit with some atrocious art-style. :)
3 Like @idontlivehere11 @PeterDuck agreed, except I liked the art style. Haven't played 3, but (at least for multiplayer) HoMaM 5 was an incredibly fun, addictive game.
3 Like @PeterDuck I agree. I still play my old copy of Heroes 3, still one of the best games ever.
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Game Emblems
The Good
The Bad
WORSE M&M released !! An expansion infested with bugs and UPLAY problems that does not add nothing really so new
M&M Heroes VI Darkness Navigation
