Pun intended.
Game is very relaxing and gives the nostalgia of the HoMM series. I like spending an evening (or half the night..) on a map once every few weeks. Also nice to play on a non-gaming laptop when not at home!
**THE GOOD:**
- *Great* music that never feels like it's playing on loop and never gets old!
- Pixel graphics that are very well done and with great attention to detail.
- Each faction has its own songs and visual assets, giving them each a very unique *artistic* feel.
- I liked how the campaigns were structured to give you the origin story of each faction. Each faction seems reasonable and sympathetic (even the undead!) when you're fighting *for* them--perhaps less so when fighting against them.
- You can have the AI fight for you if you're tired of doing it.
**THE BAD:**
- The campaign scenarios are generally well-written and designed. However, several missions involve enemy wielders appearing out of nowhere with giant armies. I found this very frustrating, since I was often out-of-position and it feels quite unfair for armies to just *appear*. This effect can be especially difficult when you're facing multiple factions in a giant map.
- Each faction works more-or-less exactly the same way. There is a bit of varation with the top-level troops, but it doesn't amount to much difference. The game could have offered more variety and replay value in this regard.
- The spells are the same for each faction. I think the game would have been more interesting if each faction (or at least wielder) had their own magic specialty.
**THE UGLY:**
- The game crashed once but was otherwise stable. Since I set the game to auto-save every turn I didn't lose any play time.
- I didn't encounter any bugs.
- There were some minor usability issues in the strategic map. For example, there was a part in the very last mission where an obstruction could be removed if and only if you moved your wielder next to it. My wielder was trapped for a long time in there without me realizing I could *do* that. This was poor affordance.
Game is unexpectedly polished for early access. In my 8 hours of gameplay I did experience only some slowing of game after severa hours of gameplay. Also only bugs experienced I encountered are grafical glitches.
There are some design decisions I do not like ( magic ) but other than it seems this game is worthy successor to the HOMAN series. If we get some more units / factions and random map generator this will be game that is very woth of its price