Heroes of Might and Magic® 5: Bundle

HOMM 5 is superb, even better than the most excellent HOMM 3. Why do I say that? Because in HOMM 3, Magic reigned totally supreme; you were a fool if you took a might hero, or even might skills. It was possible and even worthwhile to get Expert status in all 4 magic schools. There was no balance here at all with the might skills. With HOMM 5, Magic is greatly toned down. Yes, Magic is still powerful, but not nearly as overpowering as HOMM 3. The ideal character build in HOMM 5 is a balance of might and magic skills, not pure magic. HOMM 5 also refined the skill tree; all of the skills in HOMM 5 are useful, while many skills in HOMM 3 were a total waste. Often, these lesser skills in HOMM 3 were made a single pick perk of another skill, which can be worth using, verses wasting a full main skill slot. For example, Intelligence is now a single secondary pick, as is Pathfinding, Eagle Eye, and Mysticism. This leads to a much more interesting skill set. In addition, HOMM 5 adds amazing Ultimate abilities, which typically require 18 other picks to enable, but allow the Hero to get a singularly useful ability! A HOMM 5 expansion adds a building which for a high cost in gold, allows a Hero to discard certain picks, and reselect. This is also VERY useful, since sometimes the random choices available are not what you really want. HOMM 5 also add a very useful autoplay feature, which allows simple battles to be fought instantly by the AI, saving a LOT of time. If you don't like the result and think you can do better, you can reject the computer outcome and play the battle yourself. AND you even get to select whether the AI can use your mana during the combat or not. As for the other criticisms, the neutral monster strength can be set from very weak to very strong when you build the map, so I don't understand what the previous reviewer was complaining about. The AI is better than HOMM 3. If you don't like the 3D graphics, you can set the graphics to the classical HOMM 3 flat 2D graphics. It seems like some of the critics just did not explore the rich options available to them in HOMM 5. In my opinion, having played HOMM 6 as well, HOMM 5 is the best of the series, and well worth buying!!!

The game is the last decent position in the series. It's based on the Heroes 3, but has vastly improved hero development and more unique creature abilities. Otherwise it is worse than the famous predecessor: 1) 3D graphics is less readable and also less attractive 2) there is much less content available (maps!) 3) the music is ok, but it's disappointing when compared to previous games 4) gameplay is artificially slowed down compared to the previous games. 5) it lost the might and magic feeling

The LAST AND THE BEEST heroes strategy game. Shame thay didnt make more good games under ubisoft.

I love this game to death. i do! but... it still crashes and corrupt save files almost 20 years later... is there any fix? this litterally makes the game not worth investing time into. I have tried the run as admin, the play in windov mode, play compatiable with windows 7, xp, vista and so on. nothing helps

Being a long-time fan of the series and having played all of the previous HOMM games, often over and over again (I think I've had HOMM3 installed on all the computers I ever owned), I grabbed this game shortly after it was released. As others have mentioned, after the disappointment that HOMM4 was, playing HOMM5 felt like getting back to the good old gameplay we saw developing through HOMM1 and 2 and perfected in HOMM3. I'm not saying that HOMM5 is flawless, but as far as game mechanics go, it feels very much like HOMM3 that we learnt to know and love, with some minor changes on the sides - for some those might be improvements, for some they may not be such a great idea, but most of the time they don't affect your gameplay very much and I felt the new and the old was fairly well balanced and put together. The only thing HOMM5 is really lacking is good storytelling - I used to enjoy the stories behind campaigns and different factions with their respective agendas almost as much as I enjoyed the actual game. This is hardly the case with HOMM5. The story is fairly linear and not very captivating, you don't get much of an insight into the history/mythology of the world, and the cutscenes you are presented with are just butt-ugly. So with all that said, if you are looking for a captivating story and characters you can identify with, go and find a good book to read. If you are looking for a clone of HOMM3, you may end up annoyed and/or disappointed by HOMM5 like other reviewers here seem to be. But if you are looking for a good successor to the HOMM series which can give you almost as many hours as gameplay as the HOMM3 did, and you are willing to accept a few changes, HOMM5 should be on the top of your list. Actually, having seen it here, I think I'm going to install it now and have a rerun of the whole game...