Elemental Heroes Online Client

Most strategy fans should be very fond of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, because along with King’s Bounty and a few others, they defined the fantasy turn-based strategy genre. Even modern video games use the same concepts, and the franchise is still going strong, albeit with a different developer and a new direction in regards to the target audience.

Elemental Heroes is an online version of the HoMM recipe, although it’s not an official one. There are some new elements in there, but if you’ve played the original you should be more than comfortable in this one as well. As such, the goal is to raise your hero’s experience level, gather resources and build a massive army in order to defeat monsters and other players. There are a couple of different classes to choose from before you create a hero, as well as four elements that decide what kind of creatures and spells you can wield. Hence, there’s nature, fire, ice and shadow, as well as classes like berserk, magician and sniper. As mentioned before, the choice you make in the beginning affects the nature of the spells you can cast.

The combat system is a tad weird, in the sense that it’s a mashup of a few different concepts. Hence, the units are collected in card form and you can have five of them at the same time. However, once the battle begins, everything looks and works exactly like in Heroes of Might and Magic, which means that you switch to a side view and move the units on a hex grid. As far as the graphics are concerned, the artwork is not bad per se, but it can be pretty tough to admire anything, what with all the combat you seem to be forced into. Everything is in two dimensions, which is kind of a bummer this day and age. Thus, you are not able to zoom or rotate the camera, nor pan it around to see more of the map.

In the end, it’s also worth mentioning that Elemental Heroes accepts microtransactions, in case you want to purchase resources or unlock better cards. In fact, it becomes rather difficult to enjoy after a while if you refuse to pay actual money, which is not very nice.