I played this for the first time in 2025, and was disappointed. The UI is very dated; it needs way more hotkeys, it's very unintuitive at times, and only seldom gives you specific information about what a talent or ability actually does. The music is bad. All of the above, I could excuse if the gameplay was great. It was not. It mostly involved me chasing around weak enemy armies who kept running away from me, until I finally caught them and forced them to do battle, only for them to run away from combat and teleport to their base for free. I don't care what the rationale for this dynamic is, it doesn't make for good gameplay. On to the positives: I loved the art direction for this game. They do a great job of portraying heroic fantasy, and for that, I'm giving it a higher score than I otherwise would have. I've played and thoroughly enjoyed similar games, but not this one. This game is primarily for old fans who played it way back when; I would not recommend it to new players today.
There's quite a bit of nostalgia in this review; I played this when I was a kid. Unlike most games I played then, I still keep on playing this one occasionally. The graphics and animations are dated, but they're also clear and help to sell the game's fantasy. The music is alright. The writing is pretty basic, especially for the campaigns, but it's never offensively bad. The draw for HoMM4 is the gameplay. Honestly, this is what I always wanted a game like Civilization to be; less focus on micromanaging 30 cities, more focus on combat. This game blends exploration and management and combat brilliantly, and easily surpasses other, similar games- it's better than the other old games from the HoMM series, and it's better than newer games like King's Bounty, Against the Storm and Songs of Conquest. If you have any interest in this genre at all, give HoMM4 a try, this little guy from 2002 is still the best of its kind.
Children of Morta is a rogue-lite action game where you can play as a Fighter, Archer, Rogue, Mage, Monk or Barbarian. Gameplay's mostly good, and I say mostly because the Rogue sucks. The game's plot can be summarized as "Oh noes, corruption corruption corruption". It's Blizzard-level storytelling; mostly inoffensive, especially if you have a Sargon video running on your second monitor and ignore the game's plot. This is a big endorsement from me for an action game, if you want to see what offensive storytelling looks like, go play Hades. There's some family drama that Ben and Jerry have to deal with, but then you get to buy upgrades and jump back into a dungeon. The action is good, but it's not always easy to keep track of the like 10 different buttons you need to use. Gameplay variety is offered mostly through the different playstyles of your playable classes. Every now and then, you'll run into grandma in a dungeon, she's a very chatty ventriloquist who speaks through the narrator's voice and doesn't know when to shut up. Don't worry though, just when she's starting to become unbearable, she dies.
