Earlier this week I posted my first impressions of Ubisoft’s Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, and after long hours of trial and error I’ve finally beaten the game. If you’re asking yourself if it gets that difficult to beat, the answer is yes.

I’d never expected to encounter such a high difficulty level on a Nintendo DSi game as the handheld seems like a platform best suited towards more causal fare. But don’t get me wrong, it’s quite the entertaining game, and perhaps mixes fun with the brain teaser puzzles better than most.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes‘ storyline is actually pretty intriguing and the script writers did a good job. Basically, the family members of the protagonists (Anwen, Godric, Fiona, Nadia and Aiden) were killed off by demons (led by Lord Bloodcrown) who are trying to corrupt the entire world. Each commands different factions: Elves, Humans, Undead, Academy Mages and Demons (accordingly with the previously named characters.) You control each of the characters at different times as they each get separated and scattered by a portal rift. The mission? To try to fight their way towards each other to unite again.

Each section of the story takes place in different environments and your heroes encounter new characters to help them. There are also a load of side quests available in the form of bounties. Getting bounties earns you extra resources that can be used to buy more troops for your line-up and rack up experience points.

Each faction has core units, elites and champions. Core units make up the majority of your forces and when combined in threes can either form wall formations (like a phalanx) or attack formations. They all have different effects as well. It will take a while to attack due to the turn-based gameplay dynamics. Elites require two core units to power it up but they do different things. Some can break up formations, some can freeze units, some can heal you, and some are just plain beastly in their attacks. The same can be said of champion units, which require four cores to power them. Champions are very, very powerful and one powering up and getting their attack out can potentially end a game.

Boss fights are also quite challenging and constantly forcing you to stay on your feet and attack/defend on all fronts while trying to power up your elites, champions and core units. Some are easier than others. This review would have been completed much earlier if I didn’t spend an entire day and a good portion of the night trying to defeat Lord Bloodcrowd, the final boss of the game.

In addition to units, players can also pick up random items that they can equip to help them in their quests in the world. Some of these allow you two extra turns, give you full mana for your spells (each faction only gets one) or powerups for specific units.

Characters don’t actually speak, so that part of the audio isn’t a factor. The music, though, is actually pretty cool. There is different music for the various factions, bosses, and battles (think Pokemon‘s music and how it tended to change at certain times and points. They’re not chiptunes type kickin’ at all, but they’re still pretty BAMF. It’s much more orchestral in sound type and like something you may find in the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings if they were ported to the DS.

The graphics are really nothing special at all. They consist of simple sprites and feature cut scenes that resemble concept art from a console game. You don’t really focus much on graphics when playing this though because you become so involved in moving from one location to another and just finishing the missions.

Playing this game is almost like chess, but much more fun. You have to plan for your specific turn/move and possibly for moves ahead on top of predicting what your opponent will do.

There options to play multiplayer or enter battle mode against the CPU. The latter allows you a slew of customizable options like choosing factions, items, difficulty level,and units.

A critique, albeit a minor one: I wish that it added more mini games/puzzles that possibly required use of the mic or camera. Assassin’s Creed: Altiar Chronicles did this and I loved it. Otherwise though, you’ll be too busy dealing with ambushes, moving out of guards’ sight to avoid capture after being branded a traitor, and accepting challenges from friendly people.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes comes highly recommended, and I suggest that every DS RPG fan pick it up.