I have finished the campaign for the Imperial. The story is solid, mission design is fine, the execution not so good. Let me start with positives: - You need to have enough farms to feed your army, or else your army takes damage over time. In addition, over time and as your army grows, the food income starts to decline. As a result, replacing a huge army is not easy, as getting enough food with a large army is not easy. So do not lose your army. - Units gain veterancy, increasing their attack, so keeping your units alive pays off. - The archers are great, just watching the rain of arrows coming down on your enemy and decimating their ranks, 5/5. So far 5-star, yet here comes the but. - The campaign is mostly scripted, the enemy gets some units and sends them in waves using formations. As the formations are clumsy and slow-moving, you can decimate the enemy forces using range units and some micro. - Unfortunately, the same movement issues apply to your units. Unless you want them killed, you need to babysit their movement and oh my this can get frustrating. I have to restart multiple times just because of this. - Another issue is with the scripting itself. In some missions, the enemy can turn into a sitting duck with units spawning in their base doing nothing. - Although the game is from 2002, when there is a larger number of units on the map, e.g. as a result of the previous point, there are performance issues not with the FPS but with the units and responsiveness. Overall I would recommend the game for the "arrows experience", but if you want to finish the campaign be ready to feel some pain.
I've owned and finished the MM8 before, I've bought it on GOG mainly out of nostalgia. It's a good game, but I prefer MM7. The main reasons are a better story, party creation at the start, HMM 3 graphics. Nevertheless, I've recently got time to play MM8, GOG version, and it is still an enjoyable game. Unfortunately, there are some bugs in the game. My bug comes after I've got my main character promoted to lich and visited the Necromancer Laboratory. Since that whenever I click on the portrait of the main character the game crash :( the main character inventory/stats/... are inaccessible. As I've used only a few save files, all of my progress went down the drain. A possible approach might be to have multiple save files, yet even that might not be the solution, as other reviews suggest. It's a shame as otherwise the game still has its moments.
