mini review:
Holy cow! I'm so impressed with this title I don't even know where to start.
They have in one fell stroke managed to remove everything that made this series great. While at the same time making it completely impossible to get into with one of the most unintuitive interfaces I have had the misfortune to have seen.
The interface is extremely slow. Hover over a unit 2-3 seconds before a box appears which only contains the unit's name, then you have to right click to get the real info that you actually need.
The town interface, once it actually loads, wich takes several seconds. Is incredibly clumsy and poorly designed. Everything is controlled by an extremely console feeling menu, where again, if you want to find out what anything does you have to mouseover it 2-3 seconds to get the description up. Theres no unified menu system like in the previous games, there are no buttons anywhere on the dialogue you are actually working with, it's all on a little menu totally detached from what you are actually doing. Very unintuitive.
City upgrades are controlled from a menu with no controls on it, and there's nothing telling you what you are doing in the interface, you click something in the menu, it doesn't light up or get clearly marked, so you have to guess that you clicked it, and then either left click it again randomly for a while to get something to happen, or click one of the extremely un-informative buttons in the main menu thing.
The world interface is complete crap since you can now control the camera, and nothing is clearly marked any more, so trying to figure out what's what on the world map is very tricky. And large objects tend to always end up right infront of the camera so you can't see anything.
The underground world map is even worse. There are stalagtites hanging down in front of the camera covering everything up, and the tunnels are extremely narrow. So you can't actually see anything because there's always something covering the camera completely, be it a rock wall or a stalagtite.
The old games also had little sounds, animations and highlights to virtually everything you did in the game. You never had to think: "hmm, did that button actually get clicked?". All that is gone, there is no feedback at all to the game any more, half the time since the interface is so slow, you don't know if what you did had any effect.
The combat has been dumbed down to sub-console levels as well. The old Hexagon tiles are gone, replaced by a normal square tile setup, so you have much less tactical options already with only 4 possible directions to move in. Then they've added a bar at the bottom showing in what order the units will act. And they've totally removed the hero's usefulness by giving him an attack, but making him act as a normal unit in the combat, so no longer can you cast a spell with the hero at any time to aid your units in combat, he can only attack or cast when it's his turn. And his attack is less than impressive, easily outdamaged by a few low level units, sure it can be upgaded, but I'd rather have my old useful hero back thanks.
They've also managed to hide the "wait" option in combat very well, there's only a button for defend, which skips that turn with that unit. To wait you have to press "W" on the keyboard, something you have to mouseover the defend button for 2-3 seconds to get the tooltip up to find out.
Graphically the game is also less than impressive, with a 3D engine that looks 3-4 years out of place. Roughly on par with Warcraft 3. If they feel the need to destroy the 2D graphics that have worked perfectly since the first game, they could have at least done it with style, not with some outdated old 3D engine.
Animations might be this games only good point, as they are very well done and extremely smooth. But what good is that if you can't see them because there's a huge stalagtite covering the camera?
And I almost forgot to mention the multiplayer maps. There are about ten of them, no random maps, which has been one of the strongest points of the last two games. And the maps that are available are very static, you can't change almost any of the settings, can't change teams, the only two maps of the largest size don't have underground, and so on. Very uninspiring
Another great series gone down the tubes. These games have always been 2D, and have always worked flawlessly in 2D. And they've always had an extremely intuitive and easy to get into interface. There has never been much of a learning curve. And the combat has always been easy to get into, but hard to master with all the tactical options offered by the hero acting out of turn, untis waiting, and hexagonal movement. It's all gone.
Why they felt the urge to break everything that was good in the previous four games I don't know but there you have it. Skip this if you like Heroes of Might and Magic. Stay away, FAR away.
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