Match-three of Heroes

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is a solid attempt at combining a story-driven campaign, RPG progression, and puzzle gameplay. Certainly better than the likes of Puzzle Quest or PictoQuest.

The match-three mechanics are fun to learn and experiment with -- well, the horizontal-matching "wall" effect is kinda bullshit, since it eats away from your army count while the walls just sit around. But aside from that annoying quirk, the learning curve of Clash of Heroes' combat tactics feels like a really rewarding balance of "solving" the puzzle to win battles and progressively adding twists like elite units and linked attacks.

And the story is fine - a little trope-y, but it gets the job done - serving as a vehicle for the gradual introduction of new enemies, new friendly units, and new environments.

However... there are a couple of high-level design issues that work against the game's otherwise-satisfying progression and combat. One, there's effectively a finite supply of experience points (random encounters are rare and, failure rewards no XP) so your choice of units to consume those experience points is practically irreversible. And two, the effects of random unit placement are disproportionately influential in combat.

The randomness issue isn't worrisome in general, but becomes very poignant when facing enemies at a higher level (your chances dwindle from "fair" to "impossible" pretty immediately), and especially in special encounters, like - and here's where I gave up on the game - the one where a friendly unit randomly moves through the enemy battlefield, and accidentally attacking that unit is a game over.

How can I work around that? Well, one option would be to swap out all of my "attacks take two turns" units with an "attacks take one turn" unit, ... which is under-leveled and has no realistic option for catching up on experience points. So. I kind-of can't.

Clash of Heroes has some good fundamentals going for it, but also enough bad fundamentals that I've no interest in suffering through them for the good parts.

Progress: Almost(?) finished the Sylvan chapter.