HOMM5 demo out

[screwtype]

Okay, I've had another go at it, and got the hang of it a bit better.

It's the combat system that was throwing me most last time. But I've figured it out a bit better now. Basically, you don't have a choice about which unit to move in combat, it seems to be selected on some sort of initiative system. Bit of a problem when you want to soften up the enemy with your ranged units first. You can if you like though, skip a move for a unit by selecting "Defend", in which case it sort of digs in, apparently. But it appears this is not the sort of game where you can hang back with your melee units and wait for your archers to do the job for you.

Apart from that, it looks to be a rather fun game. You can speed up the interface by tweaking the options, although there's still a bit of sluggishness when you first select a unit. In fact the game reminds me a lot of Age of Wonders, a very similar system in many ways.

One other limitation is it seems you can't have more than one hero per army. Not necessarily a bad thing, but in the first scenario you quickly acquire four heroes when you really only have enough troops for one decent army. This means you have to strip the other heroes of their troops, and when I did that, dammit, an enemy army marched up and killed one of my unprotected heroes, who just happened to be one of the heroes who has to survive the scenario. So I lost Not sure what the solution to this might be.

Other than that, I think it might be a worthwhile game, although I'm not sure you will get your money's worth with only 30 scenarios. But probably you do, there were only about 30 scenarios in Age of Wonders II and that took me a long time to finish.

I still think the game is sporting a case of graphical overkill though...