It's not the original, that's for sure, which is most obviously apparent in the one area where they shouldn't have changed anything: the graphics. I'm unsure why the overworld terrain was redrawn, it looks much worse than the original game (yes, even with the use original mountains option it doesn't help). Battle maps tend to be a visual mess, especially in a forest or mountains and the unit selection indicator behaves strangely. There are often times where it's difficult to target an enemy unit because the individual figures appear to be in a different square. The provided solution is "turn the grid on everywhere" which makes it look even worse. I understand the ability to have more than 4 opponents meant the old menus wouldn't be feasible but the two replacement menus are visually unappealing at best and in the late game the Wizards screen becomes a cluttered mess despite only maybe half of them making it to mid to late game. Oh the opponents will just quit or be conquered by the incessantly rampaging monsters or their populace will just outright revolt. It's kind of silly. Cities don't work quite the same as they used to, you have to research and cast a spell to get access to higher tier buildings (not a great idea) and the queue system can be very irritating if you want to have a town that constantly generates units for your army (you have to manually enqueue individual units, if there's a box to tick to fix this I haven't found it). But the big change that irks me is you no longer have the option to just raze a city after conquering it. Instead you have to select it and wait for the city to abandon which greatly slows war progress. There is some rebalancing with units and spells which is a mixed bag. Item creation is much better but still a minor thing. All that said ultimately this feels like a beta or early access. There are a lot of improvements and tweaks that need to be made but you'll get some fun out of it if you liked the original.
