I must confess that I've never imagined Heroes of Might and Magic in outer space, maybe because all those elfs, knights and ogres don't really fit in among asteroids, planets and other space debris. More imaginative, Provox Games made this concept a reality by developing Spaceforce Captains and this is pretty much where the originality stops. It is virtually a clone of HOMM5, stripped of any innovative concepts, poorly designed and full of bugs with a silly name that tells more about this game that it was supposed to.

Instead of the genuine units from HOMM we have starships, castles are replaced by space stations while spell are nowadays called technologies but in fact these are nothing but mirror images of their original counterparts. Spaceforce Captains lacks polish and glamour, the interface is unattractive and units have a common look, while their behavior on the field of battle is very similar so one might rapidly ask himself if he's fighting ten battles or the same one ten times.

Complaining about visual and sound effects in a low budget game it's like handing out speeding tickets in a NASCAR race, but with the gameplay practically copy-pasted from HOMM5 everyone will expect the best experience. It is not the case here where numerous bugs and game crashes have a deterring effect on anyone willing to give this game a chance, while its repetitive nature and raw graphics will quickly weed out even the most tenacious gamers.

The cut scenes are simply pathetic and will best fit in a game developed ten years ago, so you'll constantly have the feeling that you've started with the wrong foot and this will be a huge waste of time. Unfortunately this is exactly what's going to happen and while marching through the tedious campaign it's getting increasingly difficult to find a reason to go on. The story line is dull and it's slowly sinking like an old man in a hot tub, until it comes into near-irrelevance so it's only natural for the interest to die out and completing the set of missions is most unlikely.

Now don't get me wrong...the campaign is boring as hell, but the scenario mode is even worse as you wander aimlessly around collecting resources and staging up the one clash with the enemy hero. While most of the "neutral" units are fairly easy to defeat, the combat with the computer controlled opponent will very often end with a defeat if you don't have the patience to amass a huge army. The opponent will never try to break in to your side of the map and so, the confrontation will take place almost each time in front of the enemy space station.

So while the campaign is nothing but a set of custom games piled up around a weak story, with stages that fail to get a cohesive look, the scenario mode is even more boring and the only difference is that the maps are bigger. As there are no "neutral" stations to be conquered and increase production, what will usually happen is that you'll quickly find yourself filthy rich but unable to spend you fortune on extra units. Not to mention that you can gather 7 types of resources but you only need four, the rest are useless and were probably introduced just to create the illusion of complexity.