OK, time to own up to something - I played through a lot of HOMM 4 and enjoyed it. It wasn't great but at least it was *trying* something and had an identity; it was reasonably intuitive to pick up and the factions played very differently to each other. This, on the other hand, feels like a reskin of HOMM 3 if you had to play it with a bag on your head and your hands dipped in hot treacle. I have played up to mission four of the first campaign. I really tried. The aesthetic is pretty terrible, fine, and the story of the first campaign is generic, weedy and hamstrung by directionless voice acting and terrible in-engine cut scenes using whatever animations they happen to have inappropriately. Look at those resources that all look pretty much the same but in different colours. Ick. Look at those graceless Kessen hero attack animations. Look at that gloopy initiative order thing that confuses me and doesn't tell me what's going on. Look at the need to double right click on a combat unit to find its current status effects then have no easy way to work out WHAT THEY DO. Look at the town building interface with its tech web of options concealed behind other options and the messy nonsense involved. OK, a hero can use this training ground to upgrade units only if they're stationed in the town but they can't buy siege equipment unless they're visiting but not in the town and GODDAMMIT WHY. Oh, you can only upgrade 7 men per week... fiiine... but unless your units are already in groups of 7 FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON. Is the only statement this game has about HOMM3's gameplay that there wasn't enough boring unsatisfying micromanagement? This really does just feel like HOMM 3 but I have the added challenge of attempting to work out what in god's name that yellow thing on the map is and oh god I hate grimdark elves and basically, after three scenarios, I wondered why I wasn't playing HOMM 3 instead and I couldn't think of a good answer so I went and did that.
I can't think of a better example of a game using multiple protagonists to tell a story. First off, the setting's great and you're discovering it from a lot of different angles and with very different amounts of information and of power to interact with the world. Information is conveyed beautifully through character traits, items, dialogue and background history and the limitations of your characters feel deeply reasonable and make you feel like a desperate urchin, or a priest balancing his personal life, integrity and serving his boss, or a professional with a job to do. The game never didactically tells you what the right choice is but gives you a sense of having made choices. I love the music and the artwork, I love the setting and most of all I love the way the story's conveyed. Three criticisms: 1. for one key choice, the game didn't tell me how to do the thing I wanted to do. 2. the ending is somewhat abrupt relative to the amount of time you invest in the setting and the characters. I'd really have liked some thing with your character traits on it. 3. the 2D ingame map which serves as your main guide to finding NPCs and completing quests is really underdeveloped compared to the rest of the game. But it's a game with real choice, good writing and a good setting and given how few games have even tried to tell a story properly with multiple protagonists (and almost none succeeded), it is very much worth your time and money. I expect to return to it and hope Pyrodactyl Games get the opportunity to expand on and refine this idea.
