If Might & Magic intends to stay afloat in this genre, they'll need some new graphics and some fresh ideas.

In the shadowy and cobwebbed archives of computer RPGs, few names are as hallowed as the legendary Might & Magic series. Originally started almost ten years ago, this successful and enormously influential series has become a standard in the genre, with over a dozen games to the franchise's name. It can be argued that, other than the Ultima games, no other series has had as profound and long-lasting an influence on its genre. Unfortunately, those days have passed, and it's been some time since anything with the Might &Magic logo managed to raise any eyebrows in the industry. The franchise's most recent additions, the Heroes Chronicles games, aren't going to change this trend.

Conquest of the Underworld is the second chapter in the four-chapter Heroes Chronicles line; competitively priced at $19.95 MSRP, they are designed to be played either consecutively or independently. True enough, I found that jumping in this series in the middle (as opposed to starting with Chapter 1, Warriors of the Wasteland) didn't affect the game at all. In fact, all four games in the series will play nearly identically, with the same engine and the same gameplay. If you're a fan of outdated turn-based drudgery with mediocre graphics and formulaic strategy-simulation, you'll probably be interested in shelling out $80 for the entire saga. Otherwise, you may want to be a bit more cautious.

Conquest of the Underworld is made up of eight scenarios that link together to form one campaign. You assume the role of Tarnum, a barbarian prince who has passed away, only to be resurrected and assigned the task of saving the soul of the very man who killed him. As the game progresses, Tarnum explores deep into the underworld, recruiting allies, accumulating wealth, and battling foes as he searches for the imprisoned soul of his killer. It's not a bad thread for a story, and much of the game's plot will focus on Tarnum's struggles with this paradox of morals.

Most of the game plays out on the main world screen, a top-down view of the level Tarnum and his recruited heroes explore. The level design is very nice, with lots of little details sprinkled here and there. While the graphics aren't exactly on the bleeding edge, they are appealing in a retro kind of way, and give you the vague impression of playing a board game of some sort. That's a good quality for a turn-based PC game to have, in my opinion. I liked it.

While visually appealing, the gameplay becomes mundane with unfortunate speed. You maneuver Tarnum's little horse around, picking up gold and gems, swinging by farms and mines to convert them to your cause, etc. In your travels, you will encounter towns and cities that you can also use to recruit troops, learn magic spells, and hire additional heroes to aid you in your quest. The town management segments are uninspiring and quickly become more of a chore than anything else. Each town can build one building per day (!); basically, every single turn you've got to cycle through your towns and give them something new to do. There's no way to automate this process, and because you don't name the towns or determine their placement yourself, the towns never have much personality.

One useful purpose the towns you visit serve: they are your bases for the recruitment of additional heroes. Heroes are very necessary in the Chronicles series because troops can't move without them. This means that if you have towns on one end of the realm, happily producing troops, you'll either need to bring Tarnum all the way back home to pick them up, or use a different hero to shepherd the troops to the front line. Using heroes as 'troop nannies' in this fashion became frustrating after some time, especially as they were journeying through well-traveled country that had little in the way of surprises.

When you encounter an enemy and decide to fight, the screen switches to a sideways, early Final Fantasy style view, with your troops arranged on one side of the screen facing your enemies across a nondescript plain, with a rock or two thrown in for variety. The main screen's graphics actually benefit from their nostalgic feel; in the combat view they feel positively and depressingly outdated. In typical turn-based fashion, your units capable of ranged attack will hang back and peck away at their opponents, while your melee troops will trudge forward for hand-to-hand combat. There seems to be little or no allowance made for actual range; a band of archers 12 spaces away appears to do as much damage to a combatant as a unit 2 spaces away, so any strategy with their placement is pretty much out the window.

The melee units don't have much character either, and you'll find yourself employing the same strategies with their movements early in the game as you'll use in later combats. There's nothing here that approaches the depth of combat in the similar, but vastly superior Age of Wonders. In AoW, battles that seemed like mismatches on the surface could be won with careful and savvy maneuvering, use of the terrain, and calculated guesses. In Chronicles, it's more or less a numbers game. If you have fewer or less powerful troops, you're going to lose. This adds to the game's overall lack of flavor; battles won don't leave you with much of a sense of accomplishment. I continually got the feeling that if all combat was automated, my win-loss record would be completely unchanged.

It's my understanding, by the way, that many of the strengths and weaknesses found in this game were also present in the immensely popular Heroes of Might & Magic III, a game that garnered near-universal critical praise back in 1999. Perhaps I wouldn't have been so critical of Chronicles two years ago. It's not easy, though, to avoid a critical tone when you evaluate a sequel that not only fails to address any of its predecessor's faults, but also fails to introduce any advances or improvements of its own. In other words, if you're going to reinvent the wheel, at least make it a little sturdier and more colorful. Neither goal is achieved by 3D0 with this title.

The documentation for Conquest of the Underworld is well written and concise, and the music that accompanies your heroes is a pleasing blend of traditional fantasy-type classical themes, but the sound effects are strictly run-of-the-mill. Another frustration stemmed from the game's right-click help interface. In many parts of the game, a right click will bring up a helpful summary of an icon's purpose, a unit's statistics, and so forth. Unfortunately, the interface only works with 70% or so of the things you'd think it would. Of course, the items that don't support right-click help are almost always the ones that the documentation doesn't adequately cover. None of the lapses are serious or affect your ability to get through the game, but it adds a sense of incompleteness to the game as a whole.

While competently designed and sound in principle, the Heroes Chronicles series appears to hold little to challenge or inspire the experienced gamer. I feel somewhat qualified to speak for the whole series at this point, because Conquest of the Underworld includes demo levels of the other games in the series. It didn't take me much time to play a bit of the other and realize that they are all the same game, albeit with different levels and unit types. Since Underworld does virtually nothing to advance the field of computer RPGs, there's little to compel me to press on with the remainder of the series.

Fans of the M&M series may want to give this a look; it is certainly true to the Might & Magic universe, and the different scenarios were clearly designed with a caring and professional hand. But even with a moderately compelling story to back them up, they can't overcome the vanilla and uninspired gameplay. This is a franchise clearly in need of a shot in the arm, especially in light of the enormous strides made by games like the aforementioned Age of Wonders, as well as the excellent Bioware titles (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale).

If Might & Magic intends to stay afloat in this genre, they'll need some new graphics and some fresh ideas.

Reviewed by Dan Watson, PC Gameworld.