Installation of this game was a snap. Pop in the CD ROM, open the installer, and install. IF you need it, it will install the Game Sprockets automatically. After it installs the over 200 MB worth of stuff, you are ready to play.

Playing this game is more or less just like playing the previous versions of Heroes of Might and Magic. In a sentence, you gather resources, build towns, recruit heroes, build up armies, and kill the opponents. All this is done in turn by turn time, where each hero can only move so far, and only one building in a town can be built.

There are three main types of game play. Single player, multi-player, and campaign. With single player games, you choose a single scenario to play against computer controlled opponents. There are hundreds of scenarios to choose from, and the options such as starting town, reward, difficulty level, etc give you unlimited possibilities.

Multi-player games can be played three different ways. Hot Seat, TCP/IP, and AppleTalk. Hot Seat games are for those of us who only have one computer, but want to play this game with others. TCP/IP is the internet protocol. You can play against both Mac and PC users this way, or just Mac players over Game Ranger. And finally, AppleTalk is just what it sounds like, a game over an AppleTalk network.

A campaign game can take weeks (I'm not talking game weeks, real weeks) to complete. In a campaign game, you can choose a starting side, and play out an entire story line. The scenarios start out fairly easy, but become increasingly difficult to complete as the campaign carries on. Before each scenario, you will get the chance to choose what reward you want, and sometimes, if you want to become a traitor to your faction. Be careful, the wrong decision will mean death. One nice touch that was added to the campaign games is when you concur a scenario, it gives you the chance to save your game, something sorely missed in the previous versions.

The game play itself is really quite unique. You must gather and manage resources such as gold, wood, ore, crystal, gems, mercury, and more. These resources are used to build buildings in your town, and to build up your army. Of course, the more resources you can gather, the better off you will be.

But, there is a catch. Only so many monsters can be produced in a given amount of time. This limit makes sure no one army can become so overpowering, that they can win the game in a very short time. Also, if you want to be successful, you must upgrade your monster producers, so that they produce stronger monsters for your army.

Nevertheless, there is more to fighting than how big your army is. Each army, is lead by a hero. This hero can gain special skills, and transfer powers like attack ability, defense ability, spell power, and knowledge over to the monsters. As your hero fights, he gains experience, which increases his/her strengths and abilities. But sometimes, heroes can become real strong, real fast, how does that happen?

That happens with special artifacts. These artifacts give you all sorts of abilities such as strength, magic resistance, better long range attacks, faster movement, and many others. If you get lucky, you will find artifacts laying in the open, ready for you to pick up. But most of the time, they are guarded by roaming monsters, and sometimes monsters which you can't see, until it's too late.

With this games excellent mix of resource management, strategy (in building towns as well as fighting), and so many different ways to play, I have been engaged in play forever. Sometimes hours pass without me knowing. Whenever I'm in a game, I'm constantly thinking, just one more turn and I will quit. Naturally, that one more turn becomes 20-30 more turns. To me, that is a mark of a great game.

This game has run flawlessly. Everything just seems to work. And that famous "Cannot eject CD" bug in HOMM 2 has been squashed in HOMM 3. I didn't get any crashes, and playing online via GameRanger was flawless as well.

This game kept me glued to my computer for hours. In fact, it was so engaging, I even missed a couple meals. If you are a fan of turn based strategies, then this game is a must. If you aren't, you should get Heroes 3 and see what you've been missing.

Pros	Cons
Tons of new towns, monsters, heroes, etc Great graphics Excellent Animations Tons of Custom options	No more Phoenix's Hard to win some scenarios Too addicting
9/10 stars