I’ve played a lot over the past few days. The game is extremely similar to HOMM2 (which I’ve played a lot before), but there are some key differences.
The AI seems to be pretty aggressive and most of the maps allow fairly access to your starting city, which means that leaving it unguarded is quite dangerous. This means you can’t grow too quickly, or you will spread your resources too thin and you’ll end up unable to defend your kingdom.
The battle field is a lot smaller than later games and it’s a bit unclear how the underlying grid works exactly. You just have to move your cursor around and guess where you can go, which is not the greatest UX. I did get used to it however and it works reasonably well.
What’s really different is how magic works. There is no mana and instead the magic towers produce spells each week which your hero can collect when he visits town. So instead of running out of mana, you actually run out of certain spells. This makes me quite hesitant to use magic at all, because depending on a spell means I can’t use that spell in the future. It really becomes more of a last resort for me.
There are no monster upgrades, but there are more monsters types than there are slots, so you have to decide which units to bring along, just like in later games.
All in all this games has all the basic foundation in place on which the later games are based and it all works reasonably well. The game never crashed on me and I didn’t encounter any bugs or anything. It’s not as polished or feature rich as I’m used to, but still very very enjoyable to play!
