To not buy. Or get it for super-cheap in the Christmas sales or something. Less than £3 sounds about right.

In terms of graphical fidelity, D3 looks like a very pretty Playstation 2-era game. In other words, if you play D3 at 800x600 (D2's native res), D2 is by far the prettier game. D3 has no normal mapping to speak of, lots of texture shimmer even at ridiculous AF levels, and the lighting is dull and flat.

The art direction, however, is outstanding. D3 is almost as visually interesting and coherent as D2. And considering D2 is pretty universally regarded as having some of the best AD in video gaming history, that's no small feat. Unfortunately D3's AD is a fairly large stride closer to the cutesy/purdy camp than D2.

The storyline of D3 is arguably the best of the series, and barring a couple of translation oddities, the storytelling is of a higher quality. Saying much more would be spoilerific, methinks.

The game mechanics are somewhat different from the previous games.

Where you used to use specialist stacks to exert terrain/resource control, terrain control is now a function of resource control, and resource control is no longer a rod you plant, but a static stack in its own right that can fight, gain experience & be reinforced as per usual for the series.

The tactical battles have been transformed into something out of Heroes of Might & Magic: you move your units around a hex map with a few different types of terrain. The main difference from HoMM is that certain tiles on the tactical maps will provide a massive bonus to a certain attack type.

The strategic game is largely unchanged mechanically, but pretty much everything that can be done at the strategic level has been severely nerfed compared to the predecessors. This makes a huge difference in terms of the actual gameplay. The predecessors were very much won (or lost) by your actions on the strategic layer, the tactical battles were virtually always a foregone conclusion. D3 is the exact opposite. What you do on the strategic layer is largely unimportant in D3, the tactical battles is what will win you the game.

Without further comment, I'm sure D3 sounds to be an interesting take on the series and, if perhaps not as great as the predecessors, quite a decent game. And I'm pretty sure it really could have been, if not for the AI. In a nutshell, the AI is the worst I have ever seen in a HoMM-like, and it single-handedly kills the game.

Imagine playing a game of Tetris, where every block you get lands & fits perfectly automatically. It wouldn't be a game, it would be like watching paint dry. The AI is so utterly hopeless at playing D3 that the effect is very much the same. You'll perhaps spend half the first map figuring out how to play, and feeling pretty good you're doing so well. Then you'll perhaps spend the other half thinking you're extremely clever. By the second map, though, you'll be bored silly and if you feel anything at all, it will be pity for the AI. Followed shortly by pity for yourself over buying the game.

Still, on the off-chance that you really-really like a game where every button is labelled "Win", D3 is a bit of a let-down. Because compared to the predecessors, it is extremely light on content. An educated guess says D3 has maybe 1/5th the content of D2, but I haven't done a direct comparison.

Bugs & Polish: D3 released in a state only marginally better than Elemental: War of Magic, but it has been patched a great deal since then. I can tell you that at my end, the first patch after the international release basically rendered it bug-free. But the game had all sorts of fringe-case compatibility issues, and I absolutely cannot promise it won't crash & burn on any PC other than the one I'm currently using.