Disciples: Sacred Lands Gold

NOT RECOMMENDED. It is very annoying and boring and just another difficulty-padded Heroes clone, with the same color-mess-up bug from Alt+Tabbing as in Age of Wonders 1. he user interface is so bad I needed to thoroughly research the manual to learn how to recruit units, the most vital action of all Heroes clones. Here's how it was done: go through the city view to the army view, then click on an unfilled unit stack slot on the city's garrison slots (it has a diamond mark on it) and a recruitment menu appears out of nowhere. That's about five steps too much, instead of just one. Frankly, I did not make it very far into the game (the UI has many other problems, e.g. the map units drowning into the similarly-colored decorative map graphics). The last straw was how the enemy, with full unit stacks from the get-go, of course. Attacks me out of nowhere and kills me. This underlines the sheer quantity of anti-fun this game is. Before Turn 8. These "all-seeing eye" and "early game crunch" kinds of forcibly-game-extending game design (you have to play slow, steady and optimally to have any chance of survival) is mostly obsolete and was not exactly fun even back in the day. They were popular DEVELOPER-SIDE because they let the developer substitute diverse and well-designed content with rapidly-replicatable, intentionally unfair maps. If the maps weren't this super stacked against the player, the player might notice that the campaigns were only 4 to 6 maps long and that the narration is ridiculously serious, as per the stereotypical boring D&D narration traditions.