Its not bad game overall but very "hit and miss". As game that aspire to be "inspired by" HoMM series, it changes too much of elements and for the worse, new mechanics feeling forced and odd. Having each town falling into "tier" category (also upgradable) with each having limited “slots” for buildings sounds interesting except it only means that recruiting require more walking around. Also capturing enemy town converts it into your own so you cant even mix armies. Units in combat cant defend (unless its “special ability”) or wait, creating odd situations where you can be actively punish for having fast troops. Stacks are limited in numbers without research (and even then they are laughably small) and unless you pump “leadership” attribute , you cant carry more with you (default being absurd three). Magic system where you gather “essence” from troops and use it for casting (so potentially having unlimited casting in single turn) simply doesn’t “click” and spells are generic anyway. And biggest offender – campaigns have only 4 missions each. Just 4, whooping 16 in whole game. Better to play HoMM again.
Graphic style have some charm but game is annoying to play - any bigger combat ends up in one big mess as units (very quickly) run into each other and random directions, blocking each other and dying. Even with slowed down game speed everything happens way too fast to properly manage. Which is a shame, since setting and few interesting mechanics are quite good.
No kind of troubleshooting helps, game just shows black screen for a moment then lands back on desktop.
Would be playable if not suffering from constant "random" events that are not exactly random as their outcome is determined by seed in your save file and no reloading generates new one. So you might lay nice until your leader dies, his son dies next turn because he falls ill and all your country falls in ruin because RNG had bad day. Not to mention that at some point events are just overflowing and more annoying than adding flavour.
Game starts out interesting but quickly clearly shows that developers never bothered with balancing and designed to be as much annoying and difficult as possible. Units variety is very low and while in previous game there was one skill to prevent morale problems from mixing unit types, here is split into FOUR with 3 levels EACH. Each unit also have hardcap on size so past certain leadership level they HAVE to be replaced and you always have them at too low numbers. Good units are very limited so losing stack (and you lose them very often, even when playing extra safe) is heavy drawback that force reloading save and resurrection spell comes very late and is restricted to basically one character class due to requirements. At certain point almost every single fight wipes half of your forces with ease and gold is limited. There is no place or possibility with experimenting like in previous games. And worst offense is that game was clearly designed with certain solutions in mind. Its some sort of cruel puzzle where you have to guess what was favourie developers combination and get punished for playing other way. I reached half of it and pretty much want to give up. There is no fun, just endless frustration - and thats on normal difficulty level, which was comfortable and fun in Legend or Armored Princess.
Game designed to be as much frustrating as possible, since first 1/3 of the game, each mission is more and more annoying than previous, often piting player against obstacles that cannot be dealt with and forcing player to lose units. For example, one of missions require saving allied units, placed more or less at the other end of the map. If player plays it slow, they die. If they rush it, most of them (but not all) die and player's units die as well. And unlike Sanctus Reach, attack animations cannot be skipped.
