I'll finish the AB campaigns before jumping to a different game. Since the remaining campaigns can be played in any order, I'm going to start with Playing with Fire.
Adrienne is one of the most interesting, yet tragically underdeveloped, characters in AB. She is a witch from Tatalia who loves fire. As you can imagine, this doesn't go over well in Tatalia, which is a land of swamps and jungles. In Tatalia, nobody is allowed to practice fire magic because it can basically destroy everything the Tatalians know and love. Adrienne, unperturbed by this minor detail, decides that she must travel all the way to Eeofol to learn fire magic from the Kreegans. Yes, the same Kreegans that destroy worlds. To nobody's surprise, the Tatalians decide to treat their resident crazy fire witch like public enemy number one.
In Playing with Fire, Adrienne discovers that someone or something is burning down forests in Tatalia. Unfortunately, the Tatalians are convinced that the crazy fire witch squatting on their lands is responsible. Adrienne must clear her name and (maybe) retain the trust of her people.
You might be wondering why people hate this campaign. I mean, it sounds really interesting right? Everybody loves a good mystery. Throwing in a sexy witch doesn't hurt either. Sadly, the gameplay is a huge pain in the ass.
How bad is it?
Annoying sneak attacks from merciless AI
Swamp terrain slows movement to a crawl
Poorly placed warp gates, subterranean gates make cities hard to defend
Humongous maps take an eternity to explore
Tedious victory conditions (e.g. flagging all mines)
No Town Portal (until the end of the final scenario)
I'll explain more in upcoming blog posts. For now, I'm going to jump in and replay the campaign.
I agree that the Playing With Fire campaign is one of the more difficult campaigns in HOMM III. But I'll have to say that the Dragon Slayer campaign was WAY harder than this. That campaign had tight time limits, hordes of dragons of nearly every type, and a heavy reliance on certain spells to ensure victory (actually, I think that if your hero, Dracon, doesn't start out with some very particular spells, the campaign becomes significantly harder, maybe even impossible). Hope you get to playing that one soon. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteYou're right.
DeleteHere's a list of spells one should be looking for:
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes3ab/dragonslayer1.shtml