Well, I guess you all that came here for this game have played HoMM3.
And this one is an hommage to it. At the beginning, I was super impressed with all of it, it felt like a modern version of HoMM.
Then I played more, and got sad about how big of a wasted opportunity this game is.
The city builind is severely lacking and uninteresting, the units are bland and not very varied (both in design and mechanics) and worst of all... there's a cap on how many units you can have in each slot. One of my favourite tactics in HoMM3 was playing as a necromancer and amassing MASSIVE armies of skeletons. It was OP? Hell yes. It was FUN AS FUCK? Also yes.
Is this game fun? No.
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.
