Hoping some of you can help clarify things for me. From what I read of the HOMM5 reviews, it is either fantastic or terrible. Some point to HOMM3 as the height of this series. In my opinion, HOMM2 was the height of the series, quite a long time ago. In my opinion, HOMM3 had a shallow story and uninteresting campaigns. In both HOMM3 and HOMM4 the screens were so jammed full of bonus items to pick up, the game revolved more around tracing a path for your new heroes to follow and collect a zillion bonuses, before actually meeting the enemy. I felt both 3 and 4 went completely overboard with the trappings of the game and lost the strategy. Also for me, the overall story and narration is important. The basic stories in 3 and 4 were, in my opinion, poorly written and uninspired. To further identify myself as a heretic, I am quite against having the heroes appear on the battlefield. I will still play, but I think putting the heroes right into the armies themselves made for a lesser game.

What I enjoy about HOMM generally is the challenge of having the armies in the right place at the right time, taking risks on whether a given force can prevail, and good writing and voicing. And of course, choosing a good development path for the castles for a particular scenario.

GIven what I've said here, would anybody care to recommend for or against HOMM5?

Thanks for reading.

The only thing that HoMM 5 improves upon is the character development, which is much more interesting than the simplistic one of HoMM 3. There are more skills, more choices and more "synergy".

The 3D adds nothing of value, IMO.
Voice acting is cringeworthy (as in all Ubisoft games from that time (and probably still for all I know)).
Story is poor.
There are some bugs, most noteworthy being that red enemy didn't move his heroes at all on one map.

All in all HoMM 5 is not a bad game; certainly better than HoMM 1 and Chronicles, but not as good as HoMM 3.

I only played the basic game, but the Tribes of the East expansion is said to improve the the game quite a lot.

Also, when you buy a HoMM game you get much more than just the basic maps and campaigns; you can also use user made maps. I haven't tried any of the HoMM 5 ones, so I don't know if there are many good ones, but there were many HoMM 2 and 3 maps that were vastly superior to the official ones.

I wasn't impressed by Heroes 3 Campaigns but I really liked some single player maps: Sander's Folly, Traemask 1&2.

I suggest you try at least one of them, great stories and gameplay but prepare for a wall of text :)

Heroes 5 I didn't like for the annoying lag when opening a town screen or a Hero inventory but that might be fixed by now (either by patches or by the new and powerfull computers). I haven't seen Heroes 5 cheaper than 4,99$.

HoMM 5 (with Tribes of the East) is in my opinion the best of the series for multiplayer games.
It is the easiest one to get into, and the mechanics are easy to apprehend. A new player should not have as much difficulties to get into it than with the previous iterations.

The singleplayer part is a different beast, and clearly not the strong point of the game.