Long before indie outfit Capybara Games made a name for themselves with Sword & Sworcery or Below, they made a puzzle-strategy game with the Might & Magic license for Ubisoft. Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes was a surprise delight on Nintendo DS in 2009 and an HD release made its way to PC in 2011.
Now it's getting a Definitive Edition release courtesy of Dotemu, with updated character art, quality-of-life improvements and rebalanced multiplayer.
Here's the announcement trailer, which looks pretty sharp:
Clash Of Heroes places you head-to-head against AI or human opponents in turn-based battles, and Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert isn't wrong when he describes it in the press release as a "game design gem". The cleverness is all in the combat, in which you form offensive and defensive combinations by stacking units in lines and rows. It's smarter and more surprising than a match-three but it retains some of the approachability of Puzzle Quest.
Those battles are strung together across maps in which you, as one of 15 available characters, explore, chat to NPCs and take on sidequests. There's none of the kingdom management from the main series Might & Magic games, but the result is fleet-footed, relaxing, and just-one-more-turn engrossing.
Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes Definitive Edition will launch via Steam sometime this summer. I can't wait. If only because I'd like to see it consume Katharine as much as Capybara's more recent Grindstone.
Alas, this does mean the non-Definitive release is no longer available for sale from Steam.
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