I've put about 30 hours in and just can't be assed to continue.
Not that I think it's a bad game, I'd say it is probably by far the best HoMM-like and I'd go even further and say I like it more than HoMM1-2.
But it falls into the same scenario/map design traps as all the originals (and most similar games) do.
The game knows no chill, no exploration, you always have to rush, rush, rush, rush the optimal path and if you fail to do that you can just repeat the scenario until you find the exact way you are meant to play the entire map. And the optimal path is always the same, an optimal build/walk order per map and race.
You didn't know that at turn 23 there will be an army attacking you from this or that direction and you didn't prepare for that? Too bad, get rekt son, the last 3 hours you played were wasted. Ugh.
And of course, the only real strategy is to beeline for the highest tier units and just spam those, if you keep lower tier units around, you'll just die as even a full stack of them will be wiped turn 1 by enemy magic. That bonus to low tier unit X your character has? It's a trap. Ignore it.
I'm just not a fan of that kind of game design as it combines two things I don't like:
- Lack of player choices (I mean, there ARE choices, but all except one are usually wrong)
- Requiring prior knowledge of a scenario in order to play well
I know they tried to limit the doomstack somewhat in this game by having max amount of units in a stack, but all that did is make magic even more insanely OP.
Have fun being forced to fight the main enemy army with one trash army before your main one, because the enemy army consists of the 6x highest enemy ranged stack + turn one/two doom spell, because the enemy somehow has more bonuses than exist on the entire map and WILL defeat any army you send at it so you'll just have to send multiple ones to wear it down. You basically need to drain the enemy's single-fight bonuses before fighting it
This puzzle-like approach is fun for some time (as I said, took me 30 hours to be fed up), but I have no idea how people get so hooked on doing the exact same thing every time, or repeat a map as often as needed until the optimal path is found, that they spend hundreds of hours in these games.