"Dissapointing"

My first review, yay me. Unfortunately I chose a poor game to be my first new bought PC game in almost half a decade. I've played earlier HOMM games, and came away amused, but ultimately just enjoying the game for it's straightforwardness. Run around the map, collect treasure, build a wicked army of level 3 and 4 creatures and own my opponent.

It's a shame that none of this is really possible, due to an immense weighting of the game in the computer's favor. The campaign game is ridiculously hard in places, where even when you cheat the game is next to impossible, and playing on any of the harder difficulty levels is just pointless.

Additionally, the voice-acting and cut-scenes are just terrible. Graphics do not make the game all by themselves, but given the state of modern graphics the ones in HOMM V just don't stand up well at all. The cut-scenes are repetitive, the character modelling in them terrible and the voice-actors probably deserve to be shot for the good of humanity.

So is there any good in this turgid product? well yes, there is actually. One of the reasons I keep coming back to the HOMM series is because I genuinely enjoy the element of strategic combat the game and that at least survives more or less unscathed in this game. You still have very little usable information on your characters and monsters, but what you have allows you to make some interesting strategic appreciations.

The first and foremost is that you might as well not cast speed or slow spells. The effect is so negligible that you are almost always better off using offense magic or skills than trying to speed up your archangels or whatnot, and the net result of this is that you spend most of the battle not looking at the field, but at the order-list of the battle, so that you can make sure you hit the thing that's about to hit you so you take less damage. It's hardly an evocative way of doing battle, but it seems to get the job done.

All in all very disappointing, and I shall be trading in this game poste-haste for a better choice.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06