For twenty years “Heroes IV” has been trashed by people who played it like “III”. Here are four things to know so you don’t become one of them.
“Heroes III” is a religion. “IV” is a heresy, released in 2002 by a studio that was already dying. Most people launched it, saw that everything was wrong, and went back to praying to “III”. Half the complaints about the game are really complaints about playing it wrong.
The hero fights. He no longer stands off-screen with a spellbook. He walks onto the battlefield, hits, gets hit on the head and can fall. So a levelled-up knight isn’t an army ornament but its best fighter, and an unguarded mage is a dead man.
Armies move without a hero. Troops travel the map on their own: they capture mines, gather resources, bring up reinforcements. There are caravans between towns. Whoever drags every creature behind one hero, like in “III”, loses to whoever plays with three hands at once.
The hero no longer stands on the sidelines. He fights himself — and falls himself.
A town makes you choose. At levels two to four every town has two creatures, and you can build only one. The other will never appear in that town. It’s not developer greed but the main decision of the game: it decides which war you’ll fight.
Combat is about position, not turns. In melee, the strike and the counter happen at the same time, so even the first blow costs blood. Archers and mages decide more than the number of swords, and whoever throws everything head-on loses the army in two turns.
Our port changes none of this: the same game, the same rules, both expansions. The map just updates 60 times a second instead of 20, and the campaigns are in Ukrainian, except The Gathering Storm. The rest is on your conscience.