Ok, an entirely objective review, I can do that because I'm a dick.
Thinking in 98 terms. Graphics, good. Sound, excellent. Atmosphere, one of the best. Naturally by todays standards, the graphics are horrific, the sound is barely tolerable, and the atmosphere is to doom what a three legged chihuahua is to a wolfhound
Gameplay, issues...
First, there's the AI. OMFG bad. As in, you suck monkey nuts if you lose on a map that's at all fair. If you really want a challenge, you try beating the standard game without taking your temple and live off resource sites and bartering to gather your troops.
The overland AI is utterly devoid of logic. They'll throw units at you and attempt to run away from a losing fight, they'll even spam you with merc armies when you're about to kill them and within range of the hiring point. What they wont do is systematically destroy each other and form competent, highly leveled fighting forces from the results, protect those units, and come at you with max training armies. If you wait long enough, they eventually reach the level where they pop them out of the barracks at level 5, but till then you have a massive tactical advantage.
The battle AI. Irritating, but not really dangerous. More nuisance than anything. You need to quickly eliminate ranged units if you have a caster that doesn't come with a good arrow shield, but tying the melee units up on tough defenders while a mass of ranged units rape them is easy. There isn't much there, just run towards you and die. They'll occasionally try to kill your heroes and that's about it.
Balance. Sorta iffy. Ignoring death, which is massively overpowered on purpose, the sides are relatively even if you compare them at high levels, but without a level 10 caster you'd never know fire and chaos had a snowball's chance in hell of doing anything. The chaos caster is so powerful that it can kill entire armies single handed at that point even without artifact class weapons. Which is good because the chaos army is the weakest outside of the magic. This is academic though, multiplayer is hosed, so many sync errors... I never managed to finish a game.
Then there's the terrain... The different races all have favored terrain. Even flying units are affected. Life on grass moves normally, life on decayed ground crawls at half speed, inching along like frozen molasses. If a life army, a biggest badass that ever existed since the dawn of time life army, attacked you as Balkoth, just Balkoth, on decayed ground, Balkoth would win, and have full life at the end. Unless you were utterly ******ed and couldn't even just let him attack on his own.
On the reverse, even Balkoth can't save a maxed out death army on grass against a life army. The javelin will all die before they get in range, the life cavalry attack fast enough to prevent the death melee troops from counter attacking just one on one, and the giant lardass riding a vampire bat will soon be the only thing left, occasionally eeking out a knife through between hits.
It's also really . .. .. .. .in easy to win if you're a dick. Start with a caster for your lord, level it up a bunch, stick it in a tower till you're trained to level 8 or so, and then spam armies of three mages. Attack all the leaders and missile spam them right off, side killed.
The design is . .. .. .. .ing fantastic. Turn based overland plays far better than modern TBS games while tactical combat is fluid and far more entertaining than HoMM for instance while not being so bloody long. The game had the potential to be the best strategy game ever made, but it's got some issues, definitely worth checking out though. Especially for five bucks in a bargain bin.
Merddyn, checking out that mod. Been a long time since I played, will be interesting to see what improvements have been made.
I'm actually pretty sure they'll build a decent game but I'm a graphic guy.
