Heroes of Might and Magic® 4: Complete

It would have been five stars if HOMM 3 didn't exist. It is better, if you haven't played it go do that instead. But do you want a similar, yet challenging game with good writting, opera singing ost and a solid tactical and strategic system. A fantasy setting that's far from generic. Most of the bad press this game has is for being a bad successor to HOMM 3. It's very bad at that. But it didn't have Dungeon or Fortress as castles, so it missed the mark on that for me. Still a nice ride, if you want to make a lean mean killing machine out of your heroes. Today it's one of the best tactical strategy games out there. Do yourself a favour, and get it and run it on any machine. P.S. It looked stunning when it came out, it was absolutely beutiful then, and it hasen't aged as badly as later full 3D games.

Adverb overuse in the narrative text would drive Stephen King mad, but the story is solid. Using heroes on the battlefield is such a game changer. The real problem is the overworld AI is atrocious. It'll let you do whatever you want so playing it becomes a triviality (or a tedious slog). It seems like there a few challenging maps, but overall there's way too much turning off of the brain for a supposed strategy game.

HOMM III brough the classic formula to perfection, so the only way to make a worthy successor was to rethink the whole game. HOMM IV was a bold attempt to evolve the series and, despite all its shortcomings, for the most a succesful one. It features the best campaigns of the whole franchise, and offers the most strategic options among all the Heroes titles (which are usually quite shallow under this regard, the strategic layer being just a sort of pretext for the engaging tactical battles; unfortunately this makes also more apparent the traditional weakness of HOMM's strategic AI). Having the hero in the field makes the tactical encounters more interesting, even if there are issues with the later campaign maps as the heroes themselves becomes by then killing machines of Doom (to be honest this is a long-standing issue with HOMM, never really addressed. The possibility given by HOMM IV to go after the hero in the tactical map is probably the closest attempt to fix this "honestly"). As a long-term fan of the series, I believe that HOMM IV is a turning point and a missed opportunity (HoMM V and VI are just inferior versions of HoMMIII, even if the V is not a bad game by itself)

Back when this game was brand-new, people liked to criticize it for not being like 3. Nowadays it is much easier to judge it as its own game - slightly janky and without a good budget, especially for its expansions, simpler yet still with an incredible potential due to how the heroes themselves are designed as units rather than leaders. If you want something familiar yet different that offers a new experience and perspective to the other games in the series, give it a shot.

Awesome old school game still looks great and it has a good soundtrack