love the new caravan feature so you can just have a hands free delivery of creatures to whichever castle you want. also am liking the more condensed skills and abilities that overlay with the racial quirks to make the different types of heroes more differentiated, but this means all your heroes tend to look the same now as they tend to get the same subset of abilities. Also like the ability to switch between different upgraded creatures of the same type. This theoretically gives a little bit of flexibility in the lineups, but the descriptions for the different special abilities are almost an afterthought- you can't access them in battle as right clicking only brings up the box, which fades the moment you click again. Apart from that, the battle backgrounds look so much better than the cut scenes which had polygons looking like the were taken from warcraft3, a game 5 years older. So much missed opportunities to make a spectacularly beautiful game that would live up to the picture on the box was taken away from the cut scenes and the REALLY bad home screen. It feels like the leap from HOMMIII to HOMM IV was much larger and there isn't much to differentiate IV from V in terms of gameplay. It keeps the square grid of IV but has a lot of quality of life upgrades in the castle interface. However the mix of badly rendered interface buttons overlaid on 3D castles is jarring. The castles are TOO seamless and makes finding the buildings HARD- not that you need to anymore. The artistic tension between the 3D rendered parts and the art , outside of combat which is beautiful as per IV, really breaks the feel of the game. The new castle points system is also very unintuitive. upgrades are HIDDEN until you upgrade enough things in the castle for the next required points threshold. This is super annoying. The overall verdict is like a lateral step forward in some areas from HOMM IV. There's little to keep people coming back for more apart from nostalgia.
lovely graphics, layered gameplay. It's not so simple as throwing everything at something with all your might. Pairing weapon types to certain skillsets , mechs.. where to hit from and what to aim for all contribute to success. mastery of the field of view is a skill to develop too. PRO TIP : the eject button is on the bottom left near the mech name as you select your mech. They do NOT have a proper tutorial for this button and there isn't a hotkey that is easily accessible for it.
