I've been a fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic computer games (turn-based strategy games, to be specific) for years and years now. The game has gone through several editions: I didn't play the first, but I've played second, third, and fourth. The fifth edition came out recently, so I got it.

I am not pleased.

Gameplay: The world is a map, with impassable boundaries of forests, mountains, and water. (For some reason, even, say, druids and rangers and tiny flying fairies can't go through even a sparse forest.) The world is dotted with interesting things: gold mines, gem mines, obelisks that teach you things when you look at them, magical artifacts great and small just lying on the grass, treasure chests, witch huts, unclaimed towns, mercenary camps, and packs of monsters who exist solely for the purpose of blocking your access to the goodies.

You're in command of a kingdom. You control two things: (1) how your cities get built, and (2) what your heroes do. You have a variable but usually modest number of heroes -- in versions 2-4 you could have up to eight heroes outside of cities at any given time. Each hero commands an army of people and monsters, mainly recruited at your cities. Heroes have their own skills and goodies: some are might flavored (which increases the combat abilities of their armies), and some are magic flavored (which lets them cast useful spells). They also can use those artifacts they were picking up. As they increase in level, they can get quite potent: a small army with a great hero can often defeat a huge army with a lousy one.

The battles are fiercely tactical, though the details vary between editions. You can have up to seven units in your army -- but each unit is a "stack" of identical creatures. A lone dwarf takes up one of your seven slots; a thousand dragons takes up another. In combat, one of the units is selected (by the automatic initiative algorithm) to go first. It can (potentially) move, attack, shoot, use a special power, or cast a spell, though most kinds of creatures only have one or two options. When one unit hits another, it kills creatures off the top of the stack. For example, doing 241 damage to a stack of eighteen 100-hit-point creatures will kill two of them and leave one of them at 100-41=59 remaining hit points.

The combat tactics have almost a board-game feel to them. If your unit attacks an enemy unit, the enemy unit will retaliate -- except that most kinds of creatures only retaliate once per turn. So, if you have your lone dwarf attack the enemy stack of giants, they'll retaliate and squash it. If you then have your stack of dragons attack it in the same round, the giants have used their retaliation and your dragons won't get hurt. Careful battlefield management (using slow spells, teleports, summoned creatures, and various other tricks) mean that a careful player can often defeat a powerful enemy without any significant losses.

Every edition of Heroes has its own twists and variants. Heroes V has some nice ones -- infernal heroes can give their creatures the "gating" power which summons more of their kind, for one bit of coolness. Every kind of town has its own cool special ability: Haven towns (the chivalrous human ones) can train the weakest units up to stronger ones. Dungeon towns (the Drow, basically) let you sacrifice creatures to speed up the growth rates of others.

Anyways, the game generally goes as follows: You start off knowing only a little corner of the map, with one hero and one town. You rampage around, building up your city, collecting treasure which helps you build up your city, hiring creatures and more heroes. Eventually you run into the computer, who has been doing the same, and have a series of battles, sparring over mines and cities and valuable artifacts. Eventually one of you overwhelms the other. A typical game is a few hours long, and very engaging if one enjoys strategy and tactics.

Heroes of Might and Magic V has the same general structure. But they did a few things differently, in ways that make the game much worse in my opinion. Actually, they made a single fundamental mistake whose impact got everywhere and did major damage to the rest of the game.

Versions 2-4 had very vague illusions of three-dimensionality and animation. In 4, for example, it was sometimes possible for a monster or treasure to be mostly hidden behind a tree. Every attack on the tactical battlefield had a quick little animation that played. This was just flavor.

But version 5 has a full 3D graphics engine, and serious animation powers. You can rotate, pan, and zoom your viewpoint. You can look at those trees and gold mines from many angles. When your ballista shoots the zombie, you're treated to a five-second movie of a zooming arrow hitting a startled-looking hideous green zombie.

And it's pretty cool. For the first ten minutes or so.

Then you start playing the game for real, and discover that the 3D stuff is really bad for gameplay. Here's why.

Slower Gameplay: This is the biggest problem. Everything takes several times longer than it did in previous versions. In version 3, the ballista's shot took about a second, and then you got to go do something else. In version 5, the ballista's shot takes several seconds. It's cool the first time. It's annoying the tenth time. And it happens every time. Similarly, your hero can attack units in melee, and you're treated to a dramatic animation of, say, a mounted knight galloping past a dragon and whacking it with a sword. Every time. And you can't turn that animation off (as far as I know). Spellcasts usually take a few seconds as the caster does something dramatic that gathers power, and then have a dramatic pause, and then another few seconds of the spell going off. It looks good -- but after I'd seen it a few times, it was downright boring. That's really bad for the game.

Hidden Stuff: This one is perhaps my personal limitation. I found it quite hard to navigate around in the 3D world. The viewpoint can be anywhere, looking in any direction, from any angle. This means that, most of the time, there are important things you need to know about hidden under trees from your current perspective. I wound up having to swivel the viewpoint around constantly to look for stuff. Which is to say, I wasn't playing the strategy/tactics part of the game, I was trying to work around the 3D engine. That's really bad for the game.

Fewer Spells: Heroes 4 had a wide range of spells that did a great many useful and interesting things. Heroes V seems to have far fewer -- they only way that they got the "40 spells" on the box, I think is to count "Slow" and "Mass Slow" as different spells, even though they're technically the same spell cast differently.

Smaller Maps: The maps are smaller. I played on one of the biggest that comes with Heroes V, and it felt like a medium one from a previous version. There wasn't much stuff on it, and what there was, wasn't very interesting. I think that this is a limitation of the graphics engine: the map is so demanding of computer time and memory that the game can't handle a big one. (This is only a guess, and I don't know that it's the 3D engine's fault.)

Unclear Graphics: Some of the creatures look a whole lot like others. All the elves have outspread pointy ears and similar features, and you have to look closely at the little blue gem that Druids wear and War Dancers don't, or you may find yourself charging around with the wrong kind of army. Given how much work was devoted to graphics, this is pretty inexcusable.

Bugs: I found two bugs in not very many hours' play. One: Archdevils, according to every source of information, can summon pit fiends in combat. Every other creature that has a special power uses it by pressing "C". Archdevils don't respond to "C". I couldn't figure out if there was some other way to get them to summon, or if there's no control. (As a software engineer myself, I suspect that there's a bad interaction with the hero's 'gating' power, which gives most other infernal creatures a power to summon others of their kind, but doesn't apply to devils -- I would bet that archdevils can summon when they're not ruled by a hero with the gating power.) Two: On some maps, after a while, you stop getting any more gold, despite still having all your gold mines and cities and such. Which pretty much kills your chances of winning; Heroes is often very resource-bounded. This could, I suppose, be due to some enemy action somewhere offscreen that I wasn't notified about.

Anyways, as a software engineer, I very much got the impression that the 3D aspects of the game got the bulk of the design and work. The other stuff seems to have been secondary in the game designers' minds. Unfortunately, the actual game is in "other stuff".

It's pretty, but after a few days' playing, I'm pretty unhappy with it.

Style 5 -- it's pretty. Substance 1 -- I feel like I wasted my $50.