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Can't wait for the sequel

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: April 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I quite enjoyed this game. You move your heroes around much in the way you do Heroes of Might and Magic 3. But that is where the similarities end. You get hire heroes in town and form parties of the creatures of the 4 different races. Each creature is unique in the type of action they can perform during combat. Combat enables your creatures and hero to gain levels and become more powerful. The way they go up in levels all depends on the type of structures you've chosen to build in your capital town. Also there are different types of heroes for you to hire, depending on if you want a scout, a mage, a fighter, or a hero who plants rods. Rod planting is how you gather the various rescources in the game, and it becomes crucial to your strategy in winning the game. Overall the game was very fun too play and kept me up late into the night. The four races you play are very well balanced. The character drawings are excellent and really add a great flavor to the game. The only downside is the in-game graphics are not up to the standards of today (albeit this was 2 years ago), but this is thoroughly overshadowed by the great gameplay. There is a sequel coming out that looks to vastly improve on the graphics. I can't wait.

Not bad. Not great.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: March 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

"Heroes of Might & Magic" could be considered its own genre, where heroes are moved around a map with their armies to acquire resources that support their military operations, and where battle is carried out in a different mode than the day-to-day exploration. HoMM probably does it best, but that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a lot of good variation. Which brings us to Disciples: Sacred Lands.

There's a lot of good variation here:

- Heroes' armies are small (no more than six total, including the hero) but advance in skill with combat (and only with combat, avoiding the economy-driven approach of HoMM). This makes distributing and managing the individual troops cruical: it's not just a matter of "hiring another archmage" because you have to hire an apprentice and keep him alive long enough to grow in power. In some scenarios, the troops are limited in level, too, so there's some advantage to spreading the experience around.

- Instead of heroes "tagging" resources to control them, controlled cities slowly transform the terrain surrounding them, and capture resources that way. (You have special units that can plant rods in areas where cities don't reach, or to try to "steal" a resource.) This eliminates the HoMM business of having to chase after a weak hero who's stealing all your resources.

- Combat is strictly front-row/back-row. This makes it easier to protect weaker missile and support troops, sort of. (A lot of troops can attack back-row troops, but they are less approachable.)

So, why the 3-star rating? Mostly, a combination of little things like a very sketchy, typo-filled manual; weak combat graphics (you don't interact with your troops on the combat screen, but using portraits that are alongside the main screen, and the troops don't interact with each other, either); the interface is a little clunky (if you double-click a destination and your hero has movement points, he'll move there, but if he's out of points, the second click will actually erase the point as the destination, and the lack of the move button means that every time you have a destination that's further than one day away, you have to click on the destination every turn); the autosave feature actually seems to penalize you for reloading, which I can sort of see on the harder levels, but which seems sort of juvenille on the easy levels for a game that offers little in the way of a tutorial or any way to know what you're getting into before you get into it.

Nonetheless, the game is commendable for taking a general framework and not just saying "me, too". It has more of an intimate feel than HoMM (for better or for worse) and it's definitely rough-around-the-edges, but at the gold edition's price, you could do a lot worse.

GREAT

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Disciples is an amazing mixture of Strategy and RPG.
I have listed the aspects of the game on a one to ten scale (ten being the best).

GRAPHICS: OK
LENGTH OF INTEREST: About two to three weeks
AMOUNT OF STRATEGY AVAILABE: Much. You can decide where to put your units in the party, what type of units to have in a party, and what you want your units to be upgraded into once they gain a level. You can also choose an upgrade for a hero once it has gained a level. There are four races you can choose from. During the game, you can choose whether or not to ally with another race. You can also choose what spells to research and cast.
ADDICTIVENESS: Average. You'll be playing this for maybe an hour straight every time for the first week, thirty minutes the second.
CHALLENGE: There are three difficulty settings. It's a challenging game even on easy.
FRUSTRATION: The most frustration you'll have in this game is you can barely (if ever) directly destroy the enemy. Each race has a very powerful creature guarding it's capital, so it is impossible to destroy an player. But, you never have to in the objectives. The game is pointed at something else, like capture a certain city, kill a certain party, or claim a certain amount of land. But, eventually it gets annoying because of the continous attacks that opposing races will deal out because you know you can't ever stop them.

decent turn base game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: March 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

pro:
-Interesting pictures. Those demons, undeads, dwarfs etc... are just cool!
-Plenty to play. You can play quest or saga, choose 4 different races and 3 types of lord (Warrior, Mage, or Guildmaster)
-Not a bad turn-base game. You know there aren't many good turn based games (I am sure you can count them all with your fingers: Heroes, Fallout...), Disciples is not bad. It's somewhat similar to Heroes of Might and Magic, but it offers enough fresh stuff to make it worth playing.Inexpensive for a cool game. Is a great deal.

con:
-Graphics not great. This is a 2D game, although there are some nice pictures, the interface is too small and graphics aren't very good compare to today's standards.
-Not easy to learn. If you have played Heroes of Might and Magic perhaps it's not as bad. However the manual is so bad that it won't be easy for anyone. I don't know whether this only apply to Gold Edition or not... The 15 pages of nothing is just NOT acceptable.
-Interesting but lacks depth. This game certainly cannot compete with Heroes of Might and magic. Row combat just doesn't offer that much variety.

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In sum, it's worth buying, but don't get too excited about it. It's an entertaining but not groundbreaking game.

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