My first impression of Disciples: Sacred Lands, the new turn-based strategy game from Strategy First, was that they must be licensing the Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) engine. Not the Heroes II engine, or the Heroes III engine, but the first one. Disciples is near identical to the New World Computing release from the middle of the decade in its concept, controls and gameplay, and even the graphics have much in common. Now, Heroes was a good game, so we could expect imitators, but we expected them a few years ago.

The storyline for Disciples is the same one we have grown accustomed to: times of peace interrupted by ancient demonic evil; mayhem ensues as four separate races battle for the world. That’s all well and good, and in fact, I don’t mind a simple plot if the delivery of that story is well done. I was interested as I watched the initial cutscenes; but once the game began, it became clear I wasn’t in for anything new.

Installing the game is simple, and only required a tidy 90 megs of disk space. Also, low end users will have no problem running this game on a Pentium 166 with 32 megs. Unfortunately, the lack of system demands gives a clue to the game’s major fault: it can run on three year old systems because it plays like a three-year old game. Had it been released around the Heroes of Might and Magic II days, it would be a reasonable alternative; but considering Heroes III is six months old at this writing, Disciples is extremely dated from the get go.

The familiar gameplay has the player creating Lords and filling their party with a variety of fighters, archers, mages, and the standard fantasy fare. You then leave your castle and explore a 2D map in a turn-based manner. You might encounter scrolls or vials, an overpriced magic shop, or an enemy castle in need of razing. The only difference between Disciples and HOMM is that instead of amassing an army of warriors, the Lords are limited to a party of 4-6, depending on leadership ability. However, these characters will be able to gain experience points and advance in ability in order to improve the strength of your party. When one of these advanced characters dies, you can resurrect them at the nearest town, or with the proper magic. In fact, this RPG makes liberal use of raising the dead, so much so that you may find it less expensive than recruiting new soldiers, which I would say is an imbalance in the game balance. Each mission or scenario has slightly different goals: liberate a town or destroy all the enemy’s lords.

Disciples has a basic construction system in which you create buildings within the towns you have control of, which then allow for upgrading characters and spell casting (sound familiar?). The only resources in the game are gold, which is used for construction, buying powerup items, and recruiting, and race-based mana, which is used for casting spells among the four disciplines.

Combat is handled in a terribly simple way. The two sides are displayed on a battle map with the current character flashing. You can’t move the character, though. His position is preset by his formation in the party. Simply, if he has a melee attack he can attack the enemy’s front row, and if he has a missile attack, he can attack either row (there are only two). If you enter combat with one of your swordsmen in the back row, he will be useless unless your front row of men is destroyed. Considering your limited options and the lack of any animation or movement, they could have just as well made the combats computer-resolved and saved the player the tedium.

As for the look of the game, Disciples uses some nice hand drawn for the character portraits, but the rest of the images, from the game map to the battle scenes, suffer a bit from the resolution and simplicity of design. A major drawback is the ability to only play the game in 640x480 resolution, which is a definite step back for a modern gamer. Sounds are mediocre and forgettable. They don’t distract from the game, but don’t make a noticeable impact either.

Strategy First has made sure to add complete multiplayer options for local and internet games. There are also a bevy of single player scenarios outside of the main campaign, as well as a mission editor should you actually want to create some scenarios of your own.

Strategy First has disappointed me with what they’ve done with this game. They must be aware of what the Heroes of Might and Magic series has accomplished in the RPG arena, yet they completely ignore any innovation, and actually rehash what is a few years old already. I personally was let down by how little was new with HOMM III, and this game hasn’t even reached the play level of the second one. I definitely think there is room in the market for other turn-based fantasy games, but they need to bring something new to the genre.

All this is not to say the game isn’t playable. It is bug free, easy to get the hang of, looks nice, and does have a pleasant little story. For a younger player, someone new to PC games, or someone with an older system, this game will provide some good RPG enjoyment, but the experienced gamer will be immediately trying to reattach the cellophane to the box and hoping the software store has liberal return policies.