izigame.me

With over 450 hours played in the original version, I'm deeply torn over Clash of Heroes' "Definitive" Edition - on one hand porting the game to a new generation of consoles, including Nintendo Switch, is a very good move, and the new edition would not only renew interest in this underappreciated title, but also bring a fresh wave of players to its (frankly dead even before the 2021 shutdown) multiplayer servers. On the other, from the perspective of a PC player it's a rather barebones and at times simply inferior re-release of the previous version with only a handful of new features, coupled with the removal of the original game from Steam.
There are precious few balancing changes - two artefacts were removed from multiplayer, but others were directly carried over from the OG PC version, even after several of the other outliers got rebalanced in the Android/iOS port. Hero abilities are pretty much unchanged. Unit statlines saw next to no changes, either. There are no new units, items or events in the campaign - you're effectively replaying the same game all over again, and replay it you will because, as mentioned before, you can't import your previous campaign progress.
New additions worth praise boil down to adding one new multiplayer hero and integrating four multiplayer DLC characters into the base game, revising character artwork in dialogues and implementing a couple of QoL UI features such as skippable dialogue windows (not the entire dialogue sections though) or access to hero menu from pre-battle screen - and this came with a number of minor downsides and small, but irksome changes.
The revised artwork is a mixed bag - some NPCs look better, and the portrait graphics are overall more impressive on a technical level (with finer linework, smoother detail and more complex light rendering), but some of the heroes (like Anwen, Aidan or Nadia) and bosses (Azexes) look rather offputting or stray too far from the sprite design. Unit sprites were completely unchanged, leaving them in low resolution and with persistent minor graphical artifacts on many frames, and the only changes to animations include a small QoL update to the Ghost (she no longer swipes on every single unit in her path) - the Druids still awkwardly revert to a single frame of idle animation after performing their attack. The pre-rendered cutscenes were not only left as-is from the original release, but now also suffer from minor compression artifacts.
The UI (and UX) was actually downgraded in some ways, like with subtle but offputting changes to the game fonts (they look thinner and more spaced out, making them less readable on a glance), mouse wheel click no longer working as a shortcut for battle grid view (it was replaced entirely by Alt key, coupled with a rather ugly prompt permanently glued to the corner of the screen), odd changes to the Campaign progression screen (the time/percentage box in the map's corner feels almost like a placeholder), untouched map layouts (ahoy, getting awkwardly stuck on your first playthrough because you need to click the movement node you're standing on and the game doesn't highlight this in any way) and weird lack of feedback in the Options menu leaving you guessing if your changes were even saved. Also, the game still requires a reset to switch resolution or enter/exit windowed mode, and completely lacks any kind of animation speed setting or, more importantly, colorblind mode despite relying almost entirely on color-matching units - all those things were jarring for a game from early 2010s, and are downright baffling in a 2023 "definitive" re-release.
Sound design is lackluster on the technical side, too - the music often doesn't fade out properly on loading screens or during screen transitions, leading to abrupt cuts. The main menu theme pauses when entering a different game mode, then abruptly unpauses mid-tune rather than resetting to the start. Some tracks are more or less blatantly mis-assigned, playing in areas that used to be devoid of music or that played a completely different, more fitting track. The altered grid clicking sound is too loud and turns into a grating screech when moving your cursor quickly over the battlefield, and some of the ambience and battle effects are mixed incorrectly resulting in audible volume spikes (if I can hear Inferno walls merging sound being much louder than anything else with both music and SFX turned down while playing without headphones or in a Discord call with three other people, something is wrong) or constant jarring noise in the background (like with crickets on the nighttime Sylvan arena). There are also no separate volume sliders for battle/unit SFX and general ambience.
A lot of my grievances may be just complaints of someone who spent over four hundred hours with the previous version of this game, and developed an eye (or ear) for certain details - but that's where the devil is. The supposedly revised port is either on the same level or technically inferior to the original game, lacks truly notable upgrades, is still missing a crucial accessibility feature, is a paid upgrade for the owners of the original version and replaced it entirely on Steam's storefront. Given Ubisoft's poor history of post-release support not only for this game (both on PC and with the utterly abysmal mobile port), but for the entire Might & Magic franchise, and DotEmu's role as a "quick and cheap" freelancing port studio, I'm not expecting any kind of further patches, updates or DLCs for this game.
What should be a source of joy and celebration for me as a fan, instead leaves me worried and disappointed. Clash of Heroes is still a deeply playable and enjoyable experience in 2023 - yet it deserves better. We as customers - old players and newcomers alike - deserve better. And even if the not-so-Definitive Edition isn't outright broken in its current state, I still can't recommend it over the original version. Capybara Games clearly put a lot of effort and love into recreating a DS game for PC and X360/PS3 back in 2011 - I wish DotEmu would be allowed to at the very least match it 1:1.