3DO Heroes of Might and Magic III The Shadow of Death PC Game

~Antagarich is in danger. The ~Necromancer, Sandro, has designs on the kingdom and will stop at nothing in leading his undead legions to achieve his goal of total power. Fortunately, he needs two powerful artifacts before he can subjugate the land and people to his will. Opposing him are four heroes, united in their efforts to gain the illusive ~Angelic Alliance sword, an artifact that will enable them to fight the undead.

Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Shadow of Death, a combination re-release and enhancement pack, is a turn-based adventure in the tradition of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. The game contains the full version of Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia and the companion product, Heroes of Might and Magic III: Armageddon's Blade.

Certain elements of gameplay and characters contained in these two games have been enhanced, expanded or revised. In fact, Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Shadow of Death is designed to completely replace pre-existing Heroes of Might and Magic III games and the installation process insures that users will be able to access all existing maps, scenarios, campaigns and saved games from previous iterations.

New features in the game include a myriad of enhancements and add-ons. There are 38 new stand-alone Shadow of Death scenarios that depict events leading up to the story played out in The Restoration of Erathia. All together, this brings the total number of scenarios to 86 in addition to 14 epic campaigns and seven new Shadow of Death campaigns. An additional 23 new neutral creatures have been added including various elementals (ice, magma, energy, psychic, magic and storm) as well as characters such as pixies, sprites, peasants, nomads, trolls, enchanters, sharpshooters, dragons and more.

Other new features include combination artifacts, selectable campaign difficulty levels, eight new special terrain types (magic plains, cursed grounds, holy ground, evil fog, clover fields, lucid pools, fiery fields and rocklands) along with favorable winds and magic cloud aspects. Moats now damage troops in siege combat, several combat units have updated statistics for better game balance and heroes can now control ~Arrow Towers if they possess the artillery secondary skill.

Improvements have been made to adventure objects such as new types of quests for ~Seer's Huts, a requirement to complete quests prior to passing through ~Quest Gates and the continued existence of ~Border Gates guarding passes (not ~Border Guards). Creatures can now be recruited at either base level or upgraded levels and creatures can now deployed to guard mines.

Rounding out Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Shadow of Death is inclusion of a fully developed Campaign Editor as well as many new enhancements to the Map Editor (e.g., mass cut, copy and paste, new adventure objects) with the added capability to edit randomly generated maps. Multi-player action is supported for up to eight players via LAN, Internet, modem or hot-seat.

The game includes a 10 rebate for owners of the previously released Heroes of Might and Magic III titles as well as an electronic tutorial manual to complement the 144-page electronic game manual. ~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide