Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes came as a pleasant surprise, that we never did keep taps of this game, and that when it arrived in our hands along with Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Clash of Heroes captured our undivided attention that we totally ignored the anticipated Legend of Zelda. Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, published by Ubisoft, developed by Capybara Games, is a strategy RPG game on the DS. Clash of Heroes is so unique that there’s nothing exactly quite like it. The most similar game that can be used to describe it, is probably Puzzle Quest. Just like how Puzzle Quest isn’t particularly strong in its RPG / plot department, what Clash of Heroes excels in is its strategic puzzle game-like battles. And to understand how that is played, one must know the developer’s history — Capybara Games is a mobile developer who created Critter Crunch and ported that game to the iPhone and PS3 platform.
Clash of Heroes’ combat system is, if I had to use just 1 word to describe it, it is mesmerizing and ingenious. Oops, that was 2 words. It is in essence Critter Crunch in reverse. In Critter Crunch things are gravitating downwards, like any puzzle game, and it is based on a rule that a larger critter farther on top of the food chain can consume any of those below it, and chains are made, pun unintended. In Clash of Heroes, your side of the battle field is on the bottom screen of the DS and your units are gravitating towards the center of your two screens, much like a game of chess. Each turn you can make 3 moves and moving consists of either picking up a unit and putting it behind any other row, destroying a unit, or calling your replacement soldiers. 
Just like a typical puzzle game, you have 3 different color of units even if they were the same unit types, and the game is about matching those units, which you form an attack formation if 3 units of the same color are aligned vertically, and a defense wall is formed if 3 horizontal units of the same color touch. Each attack formation has a charge time, and that is based on what type of units you have, and there are champion units that take longer duration to charge, and the charge time means how many turns it takes for the units to attack. The rest of it is pretty simple, all attacks produce projectile weapons heading towards the back of the top screen of your DS, similarly, your enemy’s attack reaches the bottom part of the bottom screen, and based on the power of the attack, and how many walls and units that served as obstacle, the game does its magical math to determine how big a chunk of hit points are taken off. The battle system may be complex to explain, it flows naturally and is infinitely easier to understand in practice. While a game with simple rules, the intricacy of the different strategies that can be applied is limitless, based on the different regular units and champion units you can have, whether you want something that is weak and attacks quickly or something that is powerful with a long charge time. And all the champion units have different abilities — some jump through walls, some slows down your enemies, and powerful ones usually takes up more space and are harder to manage. If I had 1 complain about the battle system, is that randomness sometimes play a bigger part than necessarily in battles — it isn’t like chess where every time the game begins identically, your units are randomly scattered throughout the board and at certain times you will find more advantageous positions than others, and sometimes your units’ positions is such a disaster that it is virtually unplayable (retreat and restart).
One thing that perplexes me is why the game carries the name Might and Magic. I have to admit I did grow up with the series, starting with Might and Magic 2: Gates to Another World developed by New World Computing on the Apple 2e, and later on fell in love with Might and Magic: World of Xeen on the PC. Xeen is actually 2 games combined, 4 and 5, which you could have bought separately, but if you have them both installed on your hard drive, it will give you extra quests and the true ending to the game. That was 15 years ago during an era which I would now call the golden age of gaming. The World of Xeen was so ingeniously crafted that I would be forced to name it as one of the best games ever made if I were to create one of this list for AGG. While Might and Magic started out as a 3D medeival dungeon crawler following the exploits of 2 godlike individuals battling against each other throughout the galaxy, the rest of the series didn’t really know what they were doing. Might and Magic 6, one of the earlier Oblivion-type game, failed to live up to the series’ early exploits, and the rest of the series deteriorated from there; and Heroes of Might and Magic is a spin-off series cloning a successful strategy game called King’s Bounty. We stopped keeping tack of the series for the following 10 years.
Clash of Heroes, if I have to slapped a sticker on it, is probably closer to the Heroes of Might and Magic series rather than the core dungeon crawler, if strategy and the word heroes didn’t already give it away; though nothing from the setting, story, lore, or graphics gave any slight hints of indicating so. In hindsight the game would probably not make a huge difference in sales being called Heroes Crunch — Clash of Critters. While Clash of Heroes has no reason to carry the Might and Magic name, at least it does not tarnish it unlike its predecessors in the previous 15 years following Xeen’s release in 1994. While it doesn’t carry any fond memories from the last generation, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is a unique and worthy game that is worth the time and attention of any RPG and strategy fans out there. And if you don’t have a DS and has some malformed vendetta against donating to Nintendo, you could probably get a taste of Clash of Heroes by playing Critter Crunch on PS3 / iPhone. As for us, we look forward to what the innovative developer, Capybara Games, is going to do next.
