Coming from playing the original MoM and the community patch that goes along with, I was completely wowed by the music and choices given for game creation and wizard/spell selection. Then I actually started playing.... THE GOOD: Nice visuals, AI is a bit smarter and you can initiate better dialogue choices for diplomacy choices, a build queue in towns make building a snap, a much more stable application compared to the dos versions (which keep freezing or crashing when I'm close to winning a game). THE HORRIDLY BAD: Everything you knew about the game just got tossed out the window. Many units have thier playstyle/tactics changed and even their abilites to a degree; ghouls for example now have ranged attacks as do many other units that didnt have it before. The magic has been nerfed, you can no longer summon cool monsters until VERY VERY VERY late game. From being able to summon Wraiths on my 30th+ turn (about 5 mins or less) in the original to having to slog through 30-45 minutes now just for zombies/shadow demons to finally be researched made this a horrible experience. AI while smarter is a bit too smart/agressive even on lower settings. Usually I play Impossble setting on the original with no problems, so I figured Phantasm was a good challenge. A bad idea, so I dropped to Master, then Expert, then started to wonder how much I would have to drop the difficulty to have a decent game. Lastly, The raiders and rampaging monsters still seem to go after only you the player while leaving other wizards' towns untouched. I was hoping something like this would be addressed for balanced gameplay but it seems it's not going to happen.
