izigame.me

I saw before purchasing that the game had mixed reviews, but most of the negatives I saw at the time were from people who didn't really seem to be fans of HoMM and its kin, so I bought it anyway (also, it was like $5).

Unfortunately, this is just not a great game, even in the current dearth of HoMMalikes. I give it points for breaking away from the classic formula with some interesting ideas (unit merging, a ration system that encourages you to actually push towards your goals a little faster, the general application of a roguelite formula for scenarios), but not all of them work out. The game uses single units with persistent health bars a la Age of Wonders, but all creatures have a shield (about the same size as their health bar) that regenerates at the start of each battle. This *seems* like a good idea in concept, as I'm sure we're all sick of the AI throwing poorly-equipped heroes at us to chip away at our armies in single-turn routs... but in practice, it largely boils down to several turns of units pointlessly smacking each other before actually doing any real damage (and without any morale system I could see, even once you get into the actual health bars, every unit operates at full strength until their last breath). And you'll resent it when a random overworld monster manages to break through one of your shields, too, as health takes FOREVER to regenerate. We're talking upwards of a week for a half-health unit to get back to full, and that's *with* an end-of-turn healing bonus from the hero. And I'm not going to even get into the dodge mechanic (yes, every creature in the game has at least some percentage chance to completely avoid attacks).

I only got up to (IIRC) the third scenario (an absolutely mind-numbing affair of holding a garrison against successive waves of stronger and stronger attacks, made more painful by slow overland speeds and high resource costs making it nigh impossible to find and recruit more than another unit or two before the next wave hits), but it also seemed like there weren't any actual "factions" per se - just a whole bunch of miscellaneous units that could be recruited. Additionally, as far as I encountered, no units had special passives or attacks, just access to spells (which may or may not be the same ones the hero has access to?). Together, this makes building an army feel haphazard and aimless at best, as any synergy between units feels like it's purely by accident.

I'd also be remiss not to mention the major technical issues I had with the game. Every time I launched it it froze up my entire computer for the better part of a minute. I figured it was a problem with running the game in fullscreen and went to change it... only to find that there is no borderless windowed option, only fullscreen and windowed (which also seemed to cut off part of the UI). Closing the game frequently also caused some (shorter) lockups. And the game had some kind of post-processing effect that shut off every time the hero moved on the map, resulting in a truly bizarre focusing and re-focusing effect across the entire screen.

It seems like this was the studio's first major outing, and I respect that they were trying to mix up the formula. It's a shame the end result doesn't hold up.