I really tried to like this game, because I am a big fan of Heroes of Might & Magic franchise (especially V's story is just epic, deserves its own TV series), but it just didn't click with me. Everyone knows it is broken AF, I am not gonna talk about that, but I am gonna talk about aesthetics and graphics. Graphics in this game is not bad, considering its age, but the UI and mapping of buttons are just terrible. Going through tutorial, finding buildings, fuinding what that building builds / produces / does and etc. seems really tedious. I am not saying the game is hard to understand, by all means no, however, the UI should always be easy to read and understandable at the very least, no need to make this confusing for the sake of making a game more difficult. At the very least look at HMM games, they all have the most basic UI and yet they have deep TBS combat and strategies.

Not very good remake of the the best turn-based strategy ever made

I like it

Ok I always look for negative reviews first. My opinion is that someone who hates the game will over exagerate the flaws, but at least will talk about the flaws where someone who loves it is less likely to. That being said, I still love this game even though it has flaws. However, some people won't like it as I do so I will begin with the negatives then move on to the positives since that's how I approach it anyway.

Negatives:
Crashes too much. I'd say once every few hours of play time you will have the game crash. It's not enough to bother me, but it can be frustrating.
AI can be off pretty bad. Battles that will tell you are impossible sometimes can be beaten manually without losing a single hit point. Battles that say they are so weak they are not worth your time will sometimes wipe you on auto. That doesn't happen all of the time, and with some play time you can easilly judge for yourself. Also computer players will keep throwing themselves at your defenses every time they resurect even if they die every single time in some situations.
Bugs. There are a few, one that for some reason will pop up the AI's hero screen in front of me which has shown me they get a +10 gold per turn bonus per hero at the level I was playing at.

Positives
It is constantly changing. Every time you start a new character or see a new world, the game will be different, different maps, different quests available. It kind of reminds me of Civ in that aspect.
You can chose how you play. Some games require you to be the hero, some games require you to be the villian, this game requires you to be whatever you feel like being.
It is a great strategy game IMO. Losing a single soldier at the wrong time can cost you an entire map, granted like most strat games you can always load fail (load the game and redo a fight because you lost), but not all of us play like that.

So with all of that I'd say the game play and replayability are worth it. The bugs and glitches and even AI issues can be fixed (or modders can fix them if it ever opens to mod on steam). Overall I'd say the positives outweigh the negatives enough for me.

DLC doesnt work and keeps crashing

I really, truly, wanted to love this game. When I first played this a long time ago, I had a lot of fun - it was a difficult, compelling game with a beautiful aesthetic and some really interesting combat. I'd gotten big into Civ 5 at the time, and the comparisons i drew internally, while not as close as I once thought, hooked me in. Eventually though, due to difficulty and save corruption, I shelved it. For about ten years, I kept seeing it in my library, wondering why I had this strange hesitance to jump back into a game that I could only remember fondly - and, a while ago, i decided to bite the bullet and try again.

I was awed by how good it still looked, how few resources it was using to do so. I was enraptured by the story and the characters, and as I played that love deepened - i experienced so much fun in the first half of the campaign, everything felt just right. But, as time grew on, the problems with Eador began to really emerge. Due to story and achievement reasons, I conducted a ritual that essentially made me persona non-grata with all my previous master allies, depriving me of a lot of story and energy - and my insistence on good karma led to the alienation of most of the other Masters - those that loved evil hated me for my good deeds, and those who loved kindness hated me for that ritual. Eventually i got to explore more of the story, but for a long while, i didn't get much.

But the problem with Eador isn't limited to it's story, as that could be resolved easily in my case. The problem comes with it's repetativeness. Lots of the really awesome things, the super powerful elite monsters and awesome spells, happen so late into the game even if beelining them, that you'll often just be killed because you didn't play well enough. You can't reasonably get some of those cool moments, because unless you actively stall for time, you'll just not get there. You're encouraged to explore, to take it all in, enjoy the sandbox - but the enemy seems to have a strange ability to conjure up contracts with guards that don't exist for you, just because they can. In addition, the masters end up fighting all the same - i think the only time i saw something strange and new was when Beleth on his home shard had an ogre hero. That was probably a bug. Even then, the actual troop system is often hilariously imbalanced. Unit tiers render most units obsolete shockingly fast, and yet they're still needed to be fodder to soak important attacks. It leads to a frustrating cycle of knowing that, despite these units costing resources and hypothetically helping - they just exist to die, and be re-recruited. Not to mention that the neutral provinces have the ability to field armies far, far stronger than yours, which *could* be an opportunity for skill expression if it wasn't for the fact that the best form of such is often just min-maxing your hero and hoping for good loot. Is there strategy? Absolutely - but it's often overwhelmed by the game deciding to spawn you in an awful place, or besieging you with random events that make everyone hate you. Not to mention, strategic resources are not just shockingly rare, they're also mostly useless despite what the game wants you to think.

Because you basically can't afford to carry over your progress most of the time, exploration is often pointless - it's a means to an end that can be better achieved and more easily achieved by blitzing the opponent. Everything is so expensive to move across that the super awesome legendary items, or the really cool troops, just have to be left behind. Assuming, of course, you even get them. It's a system that i love, but that ultimately ends up being undone by the lack of real follow-through. All that I could put up with, but, the real killing blow is the crashing. The constant, unerring, crashing. On my last day, i crashed almost ten times in four hours. This is after i installed the unofficial patch, removed all the objects I could and completely disabled and removed my autosaves - i even tried letting the game use more than 2gb of ram, but then it just didn't load. The game doesn't want you to play it. It's actively hostile, in that it's so determined to crash that you can't get into the flow. It saps your enjoyment, because a game like this thrives on those long sessions, those marches and explorations to do awesome things - and it just won't let you do that most of the time.

Eador is a game that, if it was possible to fix, I think could truly be one of my favorite games of all time. But as it stands, despite some of the really interesting and fun aspects of this game and the blast I had to start with, the game ultimately ends up being a sour note - a beautiful palace with barren hallways and empty rooms. A masterwork painting painted onto rice paper. I wanted to love Eador, but I can't - the game simply won't let me. Don't buy this game unless you're willing to ride out the storm. For me, even though I did, I don't think it was worth it. I truly, genuinely, wish it was.

this game have lots of bugs and it feels that is was not completed but i love this game even with all its problems. i feel the love that was put in this game if this company had time, money and more people working on it this would be a legendary game. it's worth playing it but is not for everyone cause of the many problems the game have.

So after 300 hours in this came and getting very near the end of it I can say I do love this game. Its one of my favorite fantasy turn based games. I can also say its the most broken piece of crap ever, lol

But yeah, anyone who knows anything knows this game can just one day... decide it doesn't want to work anymore and if it does that there is a good chance that run is over. I mean sometimes you can recover it. Go back enough saves, skip enough turns, do something you didn't do, maybe you can.... or maybe you can't.

Look, I restarted this game like 3 times. I... I can't do again. For real I just had two more of the odd balls to meet and a few more turns I would have gotten the ending, but its just not letting me and I'm not doing this again. I'm done. I've finished it for all I'm concern. Closing the Eador chapter of my life for good and moving on.

It's awesome very kool and random like. It gives you the chance to make your own relm of existince.

Interesting take on the turned-based strategy formula.