You don't have to guess anymore which will be the next available unit to attack, you can study the bar and find out.

It modifies in real-time, so if you put Wait on a unit you can see how it changes its position on the bar.

The hero has been a bit modified. Much of the skills that can be learned are classics, like Logistics or Defence, but now we also have the secondary skill that can be obtained depending on the main ones.

There are six campaigns, one for each castle. We have 5 missions per campaign, therefore a total of 30 missions. The singleplayer part is a bit more story driven, but the result is kind of light, because of the little movies before the missions, which are very boring long and static.

The campaigns are utterly difficult. Heroes5 is not for beginners, but if you have played any other Heroes before you wont have any problems, though the missions are still quite hard.

Most of the campaigns have a "bottleneck" mission that will most likely annoy you, especially if you are playing on a high difficulty level. And the next one should be a piece of cake, that makes you wonder who is responsible for the difficulty balance in the game.

Except the melody from the main menu -which I find too pretentious even for a fantasy game- the music of Heroes V is splendid. You listen and cannot get enough, especially the themes of castles that really blow you away. The classic effects are there: you will recognize from the beginning most of the Fxs, as the one associated with grabbing a chest full of money or the one the signals a fight. Neat. The single minus concerns the acting, but after all, you can skip the movies.

The game slows down sometimes with no explanation, especially after loading, it requires a restart. The load times last a bit too long, and the cursor from the strategical map is quite unpolished. Adding the multiplayer problems, the fact that the game has very little explicit in-game texts, and most of them are badly located, also the awkwardness of the artifacts, for whom you have to loose half of your units to obtain and then wind up that it has no name or description, and we get a game full of bugs.

Nothing that serious to stop you from playing it, but the point is that you will encounter problems but hopefully that can be resolved with a patch.

Heroes 5 is a game that keeps awake the nostalgia. Its fun, strategic, looks neat and yes, it has its ups and downs but nothing that you wouldn't manage to get through.

A must have for any fancier, and definitely one of the big titles launched this year.

Previous Page