I'm still playing Heroes 3 from time to time. Just love the game.
Got really excited when this came out and... it feels boring.
Simply don't like how town management work and I couldn't build up as big as armies as I could in Heroes 3.
Tried to play it again on Apple Silicon - there it doesn't start. :-(
Tried to play some multiplayer random maps. There were only wood and stone buildings, the CPU could buiold much quicker, much stronger and more units, auto-combat with danger "medium" and above were lost every time, on "easy" I mostly lost my entire army and so on. The game itself is ok but multiplayer is very bad and no fun at all.
I really wanted to like this game. The pixel art was charming, animations were nice, but the game left a sour taste.
Let me start with some positives first:
-great art style and animations
-decent story at times
-lots of abilities and items
Now on to the meat here and why I did not like it, and there are plenty of them.
-Campaign has these strange difficulty spikes. It starts of easy in Song 1 Mission 1, but then you get absolutely leveled in like Mission 3 or 4. Enemies come at you with full stacks and you barely have enough quality troops.
-Lite "woke" moments in the game I did not like personally. Nearly all female commanders. Blacksmith referred to as "her" in game. This is not in your face or anything, but I don't like this in my fantasy games. It's not even done with taste, if you remember queen Meve from Witcher series. She is a badass and that story in Thronebreaker amazing. None of that is shown here. This female protagonist is just great out of the box, no character development...Typical woke writing.
-Some absolutely frustrating design decision. You know how in almost every game on the planet your character and troops / abilities are on the left side of the screen ? Well here for some reason, they put it on the right side if you are defending. Totally messes up your orientation.
-The fact that you cannot keep your troops from mission to mission is also frustrating beyond words. Even if you end the mission with high power knights, surprise surprise in the next one you start with goddamn peasants while your enemies roam with full epic stacks on the map (Mission 3 or 4 or 5 in Song 1, don't remember exactly
In summary, the game is mediocre at best of times. There are much better fantasy games out there that won't make you pull your hair out. Buy only at steep discount if you wish so.