I got this game on ps4, and I must say, it's one of the most boring games I've ever played. I don't understand how people rate this game 5 stars and say it's the best game of the past 20 years and such. - combat is horrible. You have to memorize like 20 controls just to win the most basic of combats. - there's no health regen, like ever. You have to constantly munch on food, which only regenerates a tiny bit. - crafting is way more complicated then it should be. Same thing for level up upgrades. This game basically took every system in Skyrim and made it 10 times more complicated.
Refunded after playing for 5 minutes. Worst UI I've ever seen in a video game to this day.
5 star reviewers are smoking some really good crack. This game is the worst in the series. Arguably, only heroes 7 was worse than this. Let's start with the positives, which are very little: - Best campaign story-telling in the series - in the base game, expansion campaigns are a joke - Advanced hero classes were a nice idea, although pretty unbalanced Now let's go into the negatives... - You can now split units into standalone armies. Idea stolen from Age of Wonders, but it plays horribly here. You can pretty much scout the whole map on day 1 with 1-stacks of tier 1 units. Terribly design. - Fog of war is annoying. Units appearing/disappearing, makes you want to abuse the above mechanic even more. - Battle grid is HORRIBLE. You can never know if a unit will reach you or not. You can never know if your unit will fit in a tight space or not. Misclicks are also severely punished, as units can travel across multiple turns now. - History in battles is gone. - Heroes no longer have "spell power". Instead, ever spell either lasts 3 turns, or for the whole battle. - Skill system is really bad. It takes way too many levels, each skill/subskill having 5 levels instead of 3. - Tavern feels bad. You can now choose heroes, and every hero has exactly the same secondary skills. Makes them really lose their identity. - Prison system is bad. You can never truly "kill" heroes, you just keep them in your prison and hope your town doesn't get taken. - No creature upgrades. Instead, you can choose between two creatures every time you build your town. In theory, a nice idea, but it just means you always choose the same creature, as they're horribly balanced. - Town Hall-type buildings were severely nerfed. Now they grant up to maximum 1000 gold, and they cost a LOT. - Heroes are overpowered. You can literally kill lots of behemoths with your hero only in the later stages of the game. Don't waste your time with this game.
Get HD mod and/or HotA, solves most issues other commenters seem to have. I still remember the good old days where I would play this game on my old computer in a closet. Must've played this game for thousands of hours, no exaggeration. Unfortunately, I ruined the game for myself by watching streams/videos. The better I became at the game, the more I began to see its flaws: - RoE/AB campaigns are way too easy. SoD campaigns are mostly just nonsense. Give opponents strong heroes, while artificially extending the gameplay by putting gates everywhere. - The game became way too easy on anything other than Impossible difficulty. Unfortunately, most maps in the game aren't designed for it. You barely have any resources on the map. Random maps also became really boring once I learned how templates work. The magic is gone. - Wait turns design is one of the worst I've ever seen. Every single fight you start with mass wait and continue abusing it throughout the fight. Infinite kiting is also really boring. - Secondary skills are absolute nonsense, with Earth/Air Magic and like 2-3 other skills being viable. The rest are absolutely garbage. Mass Slow/Mass Haste is also problematic, and it ties into the above issue. - I absolutely despise hero chaining mechanic. It's a huge issue in multiplayer and leads to people taking 30 minute turns. The alternative is one-hero gaming, which has its own issues - HotA team is insanely slow with updates. They take like 10 years to add an extra town to the game. The game was really fun before I watched others play it. Don't ruin the game for yourself, and enjoy the magic while you still can. I miss the days where I would play this game as a foolish child and pick Learning every time.
Tried to like it, played for quite a lot, but it's just not my type of game. Saw a streamer play it and I thought I'd enjoy it, but it just feels like such a chore to play. What I didn't like: - Some conversations barely make any sense - Feels like you spend way too much time to solve the simplest of things - Progression is really slow, you just randomly get like 5 exp and that's it - Too much wandering around. You can double click to move faster, but not by much - I didn't like the randomness of the checks. This also ties into the leveling issue. Sometimes you fail an 80% check and you have to play for like a few hours to level up and try again. This is also apparently save-scum-able, which is never great What I liked: - You can pick the craziest of conversation choices without being punished. There is no right or wrong answer - Voice acting was good - Cuno doesn't fucking care You might enjoy it if you're into role-playing games and such, but it's just not for me.
I've played heroes 3 myself for like 10 years, then I found this gem, and never looked back. There is so much complexity here, but at the same time, it doesn't feel overwhelming. Pros: - better skills. Every skill is useful, unlike in HoMM3 where half, if not more of the skills are completely useless - abilities for each skill, with some interesting combos to go for - no more wait turn abuse in combats (except for the very rare case of fighting a really low initiative unit with a very high initiative one) - no more TP/DD abuse. Thank god. This was the worst. TP only works for closest friendly town and consumes all movement. DD is very limited range and costs a lot of movement points. - no more kiting in combats infinitely with 1-stacks. AI knows to ignore them if it can't reach them, so at the very least, you have to sacrifice units. Cons: - worse AI than in heroes 3. It's not the worst like in HoMM7, but it's not great either. Makes some questionable retreats at times, even at the highest difficulty. - only one class per faction and less heroes overall. - cringe story, but that's all heroes games tbh - warcraft copy-paste of art, but you get used to it eventually For me, the positives in this game far outweigh the negatives, so it became my favourite HoMM game. Sure, I still play some HoMM3 at times, but not nearly as much as HoMM5. And as always: hey, hey people. Watch SSeth's review if you haven't.
Slight minus because of the whole DLC stuff, but otherwise, really nice game. Not sure what all the others are about with the DRM, it works perfectly fine for me with no account, never had any issues. This is honestly the only Age of Wonders game ever worth your money. I tried the others, but their look and feel didn't to it for me. The newest entry has even more DLC, so don't even bother with that.
I thought I'd get the whole Age of Wonders series, since I really liked the 3rd one. Please save yourself the time and money and don't try this. Unless you really have nostalgia for this type of game, it's not worth it. First, I had to go to some other website and download a mod to even start the game. Not a great start. I then finally started playing. The game doesn't look even decent (and I'm not one to complain about graphics lightly, I still play HoMM2 to this day). It really shows its age. Even in my first mission, the AI completely destroyed me on the 5th day. Wtf. At least give me some time to learn the game, jeez. The UI is really confusing and takes a long time to know what and when to press. Do yourself a favor and start with the 2nd one if you really want, at least that one looks decent.
Full game, no DLC, no online-only. Support this developer instead of wasting your money and time with games like Age of Wonders 4. Kind of an old-style look with the pixel art, but still looks nice. Reminds me of HoMM2's style. I've only played the first two missions yet, still fairly bad at the game, but the years of experience in HoMM helps a bit. If you liked HoMM, you'll like this. Economy seems to be decent. Even in the later stages of the game you'll still find yourself running out of money. AI seems to be decent as well from what I've played so far, though that might've been just scripted content. Sometimes quick combat does even better than me, so that's a surprise for sure. Not being able to mix factions is a bit of a bummer, but it kind of makes sense with the essence system. Not sure how I feel about the fact that there's no mage guild, but you get access to all spells instantly. Like the fact that there's no Town Portal and Dimension Door type spells. Those are some of the worst ever. Also like the fact that there's a limit per stack. Can no longer go into hundreads/thousands. Only thing I dislike so far is not being able to right-click on an object and have it tell you what it does. You get the generic "Source of Riches", "Source of Power" etc., but nothing more. Story seems to be kinda cringe up until now, but that's about all games tbh. Music is nice though. And one last thing: Hey hey, people.
This release is a joke. You'll likely need all the DLC for this game to ever be worth it. There is no campaign either from what I've seen. I've only played a couple of minutes before closing. Looks horrible, and from what I've heard, the AI is pretty terrible as well. Play Age of Wonders 3, don't bother with this. It might get better once they release all the DLC, but don't hold your breath for that.
