I actually really liked Syndicate-style graphics and atmosphere. Game is nice, music is good. Idea behind having robots walking around and wrecking everything around is cool as well! But there was one big minus for me, and that's controls. After several campaign levels I just gave up. WASD movement was just too unintuitive for me. Vast majority of games I played have this simple idea of going forward (W) where vehicle is facing, steering left and right with A and D and having breaks/backwards movement with S. However in this game movement is not related to vehicle, but to it's position on the map. W doesn't mean go "forward" with robot, but to go "up" on the screen. I was just unable to get used to it, making me unable to manage movement without thinking while focusing on aim and overall tactics. The necessity to still also keep in mind how to go where I want added another layer to focus on.
I am quite big fan of HOMAM 3 and 2, never played 1 and the new titles (5,6,7) were just too... strange for me to handle. But as for HOMAM 4, I am going to pin out some points: - graphics are really nice, also sound - some ideas are really coll, e.g. caravans, making heroes to join battle (however, at some point they'll become just too strong and having classic army becomes useless...), skills and spell are fine - and some ideas are really bad... e.g. fighting system is awful, idea to ban units in case you choose another (pikeman or balistas). For me, this was very big issue. Also I had very hard time to move my heroes around the map; often clicking on place I didn't want to go, forcing me to go in circles just to pick up some small resource. And map design was also bad. I will generally take twice much time to move hero around and finish quest than in HOMAM3 and difficulty was very imbalanced as well. Maybe I had too much expectations for the sequel. It was a good try, but not a success.
That time I was very young. I must confess that here in eastern Europe was hard to buy such game (no money at all), so cracked version was on spread and we were coping this beautiful piece on old floppy discs. And it was very annoying to have 1 with bad sector and you had to pack and copy whole game once more :) Anyway, I used to have a lot of fun with Duke, also downloaded it on my iPhone. Now I am proud I can buy it and repay some money I unknowingly stole O:-) So what is Duke Nukem 3D? It's fun. It's dynamic action with simple shoot-and-run scenario. Some secret places here and there. Choose hardest difficulty and you have a nice time-killer game.
