The HD Mod is more or less a must have for modern Heroes 3 these days and Horn of the Abyss is in my opinion the best content mod for Heroes 3. Good on GoG for hosting this, comfortable and easy to reccomend to people less familliar with modding.
This is the second time I've bought a game in the Kingdom series. I bought the first Kingdom on steam a few years ago and while it was beautiful it was not, in my opinion a good game at all. I got the "New Lands" expandalone because I heard it was better, and I really liked the presentation so I bought it. I wish I hadn't. I played about 9 hours on a save file and died on the fourth or fifth island. I didn't know what to expect from respawning but it sent me back to the tutorial island but the islands you can choose to travel to inbetween missions were still unlocked. Here's the catch though, the later levels NEED you to bring some extra knights and builders with you, something you can do between levels. This means you may find yourself looking at an extra 3 hours or more to get back to the level you lost. To add to this my main gripe with the original game still remains, the RNG. You can find yourself in a level without the means to upgrade your base, or with the nearest recruitment camp needed to get more soldiers and workers behind several enemy portals. Both of these happened to me both in the original and in Kingdom: New Lands. The AI is also frustrating, at least I think so, this game seems to have a rather zealous and defensive community judging from some respones myself and other people on different forums (mostly steam and reddit) have gotten when asking about RNG, AI, replayability and so on. I would urge people looking to buy this to take some of the more positive with a pinch of salt (as you should always do). Back to the AI, I find it frustrating because it felt counterintuitive, your soldiers will sometimes run out from behind your walls and suicide by monster, your knights and their retinue will retreat from battle even while your artillery and towers still stands, robbing you of much needed fire power. Monsters can sometimes grab your characters from behind the walls aswell. Thank you for reading, I do not recommend this beautiful game.
