Heroes of Might and Magic® 5: Bundle

At first I was prejudiced, but I was very wrong, it's phenomenal! The difficulty is absolutely user friendly, the story is interesting and great, the characters (especially Markal, Raelag and Zehir) are fantastic and really a rich fantasy. Hammers of Fate sometimes returns some Heroes 2-3 ailments, but the final fight against King Tolgar is simply mind-blowing and outsanding, and Tribe of the East has a few stumbles, but a worthy finish. It's a completely fair game, I'm only sorry that the 6th and 7th episode are not up here on GOG.

First a bit of history: A lot of people, myself included, we're unhappy with how Heroes of MIght and Magic IV (HoMM 4) altered the gameplay too much from the previous installments of the series. While some more hardcore players did actually the enjoy the changes, that didn't make the game any more approachable to the casual gamers among whom HoMM 3 had hit a home run. Heroes 4 wasn't the kind of commercial success 3DO would have needed. Add to that the total disaster which was the Might & Magic IX, and - abrakadabra - 3DO was bankrupt, taking down New World Computing and the M&M series down with it in 2003. Enter Ubisoft. Gamers around the world must have rejoiced when Heroes of Might and Magic V was announced, promising a return to the classic style of Homm 2 and 3 with a full 3D engine and superior production values. HoMM 5 also abandoned the sci-fi tingled world of the earlier games with its Demonic alien races, computer oracles and blaster weapons and brought Heroes to a more traditional fantasy world much reminiscent of the Warhammer universe. All these changes could have been bearable if HoMM 5's gameplay could have reached that of HoMM 2 and 3. It doesn't. The implemention of the 3D engine absolutely destroys the gameplay. The new adventure maps are but a fracture of size of those in the earlier games, totally removing the spirit of exploring and adventuring, as in most cases you can see the enemy castle soon after you leave your home castle. In Homm 2 and 3 your heroes could be wondering weeks away from home, conquering mines and cities as you go. Not anymore - most maps in HoMM 5 have you run into an overly powerful enemy which stops you from advancing Add to that terrible graphic style, piss poor writing, tons of UI issues and _abysmal_ voice acting and you've got HoMM 5, theugly offspring of the king of TBS gaming.

Right up there with the legendary III. After IV, this was a very nice return to form. Good: - Hero build diversity is massively improved Most skills have a use (where about 50% of them were useless in III). Many skills require some prerequisite skills to be able to pick them and every faction also has a very hard to get ultimate skill, which you will only potentially be able to get towards the end of the campaigns. - Thanks to the above, taking and building your heroes through the campaigns is a joy. With my ranger, I ended up going with a build focusing on Ballista which could be imbued with attack spells and fired 3 times per round. That's 3 Ballista shots every round that negated defense and also cast Implosion on the target after each one. Probably the most fun I had in Heroes, period. - Campaigns are decent, have a coherent story that keeps going through both expansions and ultimately ends in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. All cutscenes are fully voice acted and it was definitely the best campaign experience to me. Difficulty can be all over the place, but I loved it from start to finish. - Spells are overall much more balanced than in III where magic dominated no matter what. - Awesome music. - Great unit designs and town screens. Bad: - AI turns can take extremely long for whatever reason. It's mostly fine in the campaigns, but larger skirmish maps suffer from this a lot. - Occasional bugs. Some campaign missions still have a few bugs you might stumble into. Most notably, the first Sylvan mission, where an enemy hero you have to defeat to win won't arrive if you load a save in that mission. There is also a game freeze bug in the prologue Stronghold mission. But others can be easily worked around and are not that numerous. - The normal battlefield is a bit small in size. Fine in sieges. The next best thing after III. It took what worked in it and tried doing some new things that mostly worked out. Can't go wrong with this one if you liked III.

I am assuming I am not the only one who faced the same issues: - Can't save the game progress - Every time you go to main menu you have to creat a new profile - Can't zoom out my OS: Windows 11, version 24H2 You can see all across the internet that a lot of people are complaining about this problem on diferent platforms, even here. PLEAS FIX IT ASAP or give us our money back!

Not amazing, but good 4/5. The AI somehow always has more creatures. When I'm struggling to get 10 dragons on one hero the AI somehow has 10 dragons on all his heroes. That's also on the easiest difficulty. I had to learn how to play it because I'm a COD player so I don't understand the HMM franchise much. So far I have played over 90 hours, good game. The story is kind of lacking, but after you get to the DLCs it gets really good. I mostly play scenarios, but just because the main story isn't great doesn't mean you shouldn't play it. I really enjoyed it and would recommend you guys finish it. Most people like to say that HMM3 is better than this one, well I have to say that they are half right. HMM3 lets you play with its systems more freely, while 5 restricts you more. That's not completely bad though because it takes more strategy to get into it. The only thing I didn't enjoy was the learning curve, well for a guy that has never played a turn based game it took me a while, 10 hours, to really start getting good at it. Overall, give this game a try, its good. I won't stop playing this one anytime soon!