To be honest, Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest for the DragonBone Staff (let's just call it Heroes, or HoMM, okay? That title is just plain silly) is not exactly a major contender in the graphics department. While it runs at a very solid framerate and in high resolution, the world is very drab and uninspiring, consisting of simple blocks of mountains, forests, and deserts, with the occasionally mildly impressive castle towering over the countryside. The battles, on the other hand, look better. While the animation of the units is downright bad, the models for the units themselves are quite good, and it's a pleasure to see a beast you've never encountered before--until they tear through your ranks like so much cannon fodder. Urgh.

The FMV is solid, but not terribly impressive; I found the videos in, say, Green Rogue to be a more impressive effort from 3DO.

The music from the game seems a mix of old Heroes stuff and new music composed for the game. I'll remember the main battle theme from HoMM for the rest of my life, and it's nice to have it here, even though this isn't really a Heroes title. (More on that later.) The sound effects are pretty weak, with your typical 'whooshes' and clangs and grunts and absolutely nothing that will shock you much. Like the graphics, the sound in Heroes is passable, but not spectacular.

The gameplay is pretty solid, thankfully, and while it may drag a bit at times, and the rather basic system feels more 1991 than 2001, Heroes offers some good gameplay for those hankering for a relatively simple strategy game for their black monolith.

But first, a little side note. When I first started playing Heroes: Quest for the DragonBone Staff, I felt a creeping sense of deja vu. Not from the actual Heroes series--I know those games backwards and forwards, and while there were definite similarities here, the game seemed much more basic. So I dug out my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic: Millennium Edition, took out the first Heroes CD, and looked around. Therein lies King's Bounty, the predecessor to the entire Heroes series. I booted it up--the fact that it ran without a hitch was impressive--and sure enough, although the graphics have changed, they're the same game.

I could rant here about 3DO's constant regurgitation of the same games with the same engines, beating dead horses, and so on, but then I realized that there aren't too terribly many people that even remember King's Bounty, much less people who've played it. I'm still peeved that the game doesn't put a blurb somewhere that says that it's a port of King's Bounty--am I missing it?--but it's considerably more forgivable than the twenty-fifth Army Men game in a year.

That being said, one can guess that while the gameplay of Heroes: Quest is entertaining, it's nowhere near as refined as that in the genuine Heroes of Might and Magic games.

You pick a hero at the beginning of the game, each of which has a number of starting factors. You never actually use this hero to fight, just as in HoMM--they simply guide the troops. You also are limited to the one hero. You can have up to five different types of units at once, and all of the archers or vampires or whatever are clumped together into a single square.

The main world map is very reminiscent of HoMM, but you move around on it in real time instead of step-wise. The entire game is timed, as you search to find the DragonBone staff and save the King, and you can pick the amount of time to play at the beginning. There are four Continents you have to explore with your small army, defeating wandering monsters, collecting treasure, and taking over castles.

The core mechanics are much simpler than those in the PC Heroes games. You don't have to worry about resource collection or anything like that--the only real resource is gold. Your hero gains leadership, which determines how many troops he can handle. You can recruit some units from the hometown, but you have to get most of the interesting ones from enclaves scattered around the map.

To find the DragonBone Staff, you have to get pieces of a map that shows you where it is. Most of these pieces are collected by capturing villains. You have to get a contract to capture a villain, then siege their castle. After you capture enough to get a good idea of where the Staff is, you can do an expedition at the location you believe it to be. Expeditions cost time, though, so you want to be sure that you've got it right.

Battles are done in a style very similar to HoMM, which is not surprising. The map is square-based instead of hexagonal, but other than that you've got the same sorts of units--archers, knights, demons--and the same sorts of battles. Spell play a very side role, but the battles are actually quite enjoyable. There are some insanely powerful unit types, especially on the last Continent (demons . . . -grumble-) but you can get almost any type of unit for yourself, which is nice.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the game is that there really isn't much replayability. While the villains change around every time you play, the maps are the same, which makes your task something more of a chore when you do it the second time around. And the game isn't all that long--one hard day of playing should have you beating it.

At the beginning of the game, you pick your difficulty level. It affects two things--the difficulty of the units and the villains, and the amount of time you have to find the Staff. The standard game gives you 600 days, which is more than enough, but there's one that gives you 200--don't ask me how to do it, because I'm pretty sure I'd never manage. Some of the battles are very, very hard, especially since you don't often have units as powerful as those of your opponents. Urgh. Remember to always bring an extra 'throw away' unit along on any siege, so you can use them as your garrison and start making money off of the castle.

The game controls are simple--move around using the pad or stick, and press the buttons to bring up menus, stats, maps, and so on. There are short load times associated with pretty much everything in the game, which is something of a drag, but it's not too bad. The core mechanics are fairly solid, and although there are some balance issues with the units, those balance issues are still there in Heroes of Might and Magic III, three generations later, so I suppose it's understandable. It would have been very nice to be able to control more than one hero at once, but with the real-time setup it would have been much more difficult.

For what amounts to a straight port of an old PC game, Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest for the DragonBone Staff is done quite well. The graphics are revamped, but the gameplay is still there. The problem is that King's Bounty was supplanted by the genuine Heroes series, in terms of depth and playability, and Heroes: Quest lags behind the times because of it. While most RPG and strategy fans would find quite a bit of amusement in this title, the length and lack of real replayability means that it's perhaps best left to a rental--or a digging in the game closet for your original discs for King's Bounty.