Might & Magic Heroes VII Previews

A couple of previews for Ubisoft and Limbic’s Might & Magic Heroes VII have turned up on the Internet since the strategy/RPG follow-up went into closed beta testing, with the first being over at Celestial Heavens:

Wonderful music. I mean, come on, it’s King and Romero. Free reins, they were given – complete carte blanche to do what they wanted, and who doubts this dynamic duo can come up with the bacon? It’s King, Romero and Karin-freakin’-Mushegain – an absolutely awesome team! The music’s gonna be wonderful, guys, make no mistake about it.

They seem to be getting most of the gameplay features right. The creatures are familiar, you ride around collecting resources, flag mines, build your town, fight creatures, level up and pick skills … Limbic aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. That’s a good thing.

Great scenery. Limbic are using the Unreal engine for this game and that works great in rendering realistic movements of trees and water. Not sure about the hills and mountains, though; I liked the way they looked in H4. Smaller, but realistic.

And the second appearing over at PC Invasion:

I spent the vast majority of my time as Academy; mostly because they can hire bipedal, mini-dragon lads called Cabir. Being sort-of dragons, they’re able to fire (a pretty powerful ranged attack once you have a couple of hundred of them,) and since they’re also apparently quite vocationally skilled with their hands, they can repair constructs like Golems. On the whole, an army of those guys and some floating Djinn seemed more interesting than the rather more straightforward fantasy crossbowmen, wizards and the like fielded by Haven.

The beta didn’t exactly lend itself to further experimentation, because every turn (almost every action,) was a game of Russian roulette with Might & Magic Heroes VII standing in for someone’s forehead, and the bullet taking the form of hard crashes. This, combined with a scattering of nonsense coding words in place of certain tooltips gave the impression that this was pretty early beta code. Release might be planned for September, but who knows from how far back this build came.