This isn't a game I'd played before, so I don't have any nostalgia to help with this one. This isn't a *bad* game, you get to run around a fantasy world and beat up orcs and what have you, which is always fun for a while. The different races have significantly different strengths, as do the different types of lords (warrior, mage, or guildmaster), so there's a decent variation in tactics used. The thing that's getting to me, though, is that once you finish a quest (all the objectives on a particular map), you lose most of what you've built up. All the gold you gathered, all the spells you researched, most all the troops you leveled up, all gone, and you'll have to re-research the same spells and level up the same unit types in the next quest. But I said "most" because you're allowed to take *one* party leader with you to the next campaign, and basically one leader's worth of equipment. It's obviously nice not to start the higher-level quests with level 1 leaders (and in fact, the add-on campaign seems to require this), but if you wanted to have both a high level mage and a scout? Too bad. Okay, so you take your mage and his items. Now, you got a cool item last quest for a scout? Taking it with you means your mage giving up one of his items, and given that your next scout will start at level 1, they probably won't be able to use it as effectively. Having only one leader that can progress gives me a *strong* incentive to pump as much XP as possible into that leader, so while I *could* have multiple units taking on different ares of the map, I generally have the one guy do everything, which makes the pacing drag a bit. And it means losing that party is * disastrous*, so if a battle goes very bad I'll reload instead of considering it an inevitable casualty of war. This held my attention for the first few quests, but I don't think I'll be finishing the first campaign, let alone the expansions.
