Most reviewers probably don't have any experience with the previous titles and don't know how stripped bare this game is, so this seems like the Second Coming of Christ.
That's pretty much a certainty. The idiot comparing AoW 4's graphics to Warhammer with an entirely-too-zoomed-in camera was a clear example of this. And even a half-assed derivative of a classic with shitty modern design decisions can look great if you have no experience with what's actually out there.
I call that bribed reviewer.
They basically are. Getting pre-release copies is a way to get those Day 1 review clicks which translates into money, but you tend not to get pre-release review copies if you write negative shit about the games you review, so it really turns into a money for positive review exchange.
I had problem with getting into that even when I got it for free. It looks like the bad design they did in AoW3 1.0 version. They had special units for character classes. But, each species had basically the same units. Then they diversified these units in patches, so elves got awesome T1 archers, and few other stuff. And they also created variants for each class units that allowed each species to have it's type.
Actually, I'm pretty sure High Elves had Longbows from the start. They also had Phase on Unicorn Riders from the start. In patches they started adding more unique things to other races eventually. Some of it got silly though, like adding Razorbow Projectiles to Orc Razorbows and giving them unique Throw Javelin abilities on certain class units so that they would still do pretty much the same ranged damage as another regular archer, despite their racial ranged attack penalty.
After first DLC, the game was actually well balanced, and felt right.
The patches did improve things, but it's not that well-balanced. Rogues and Theocrats are actually overpowered if you go to town with their Charm abilities to recruit free armies. Necromancers are even worse in this respect, since you can stack Despair until they achieve 100% spirit weakness, which is autofail (no roll) for spirit-based abilities, like Inflict Ghoul Curse. The PBEM Balance Patch (which is an unofficial mod) aims to fix a lot of this shit, along with the exp grinding, although I'm a bit disappointed they wrecked Earth Elementals for being an actually strong summon.
I'm also not a fan of how the patches took away the ability of The Wild Hunt to give boats floating, which was pretty much the only way Archdruids achieved strong lategame since their summons and class units weren't strong enough, unless they just pick Human race for their ridiculous racial T3 Knights. And it's a bit sad they nerfed the Warlord's ultimate global spell from making any units you summon into instant-elites (any summoned units that already exist when you cast Global Assault still become auto-elite though).
Even if they FUCKED UP in original design, and just patched it gradually in several patches 2 years later. Luckily these NEEDED changes were applied even to base game, not DLC only patches.
They did, but they failed to buff the existing specs to be more competitive with the 2nd DLC's specs in particular. That one had some bad shit going on in its specs that they never fixed either. Grey Guard has the ludicrously overpowered Cardinal Culling spell which they didn't really nerf, but instead just moved from Grey Guard Adept to Grey Guard Master. Keeper of the Peace Master has a bunch of trash spells you do not want (but it's still strong for the ability to abuse independent cities along with the global buff). And existing elemental specs just became undesirable compared to alignment specs that provided global buffs. The mana node thing helped a bit, but considering that AoW 3 took the unprecedented step of nerfing Alter Mana Node spells to only work on unaligned nodes (because they plain
didn't like the aesthetics of all nodes in a player's empire being of one type) compared to previous games, there wasn't too much to be obtained from that anyway (PBEM balance patch fixes this, along with nerfing Cardinal Culling).
The Necromancer class also has powerful shit going on that other classes don't get, like Power Ritual giving all undead (which is pretty much everything for necros) +2 phys +2 blight melee damage or the Embalmer's Guild replacing the undead's fire weakness with a fire resistance bonus (in addition to free bonus max health) for all ghouls you create or the Cathedral of Bones giving all undead your city produces a free morale rank, just because. They never really gave other classes comparable stuff to balance it out.
