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.

This is an oddball of a game, on one hand the campaign can be incredibly tedious and repetitive (just got your castle and hero leveled to where you can kick ass? Oh well, time to start the next map from scratch!). But on the other hand, it's the difficulty of fighting you're way up from the bottom that really makes this game shine.

I'm hesitant to recommend this game on word alone, find some videos first and see if you would enjoy the Civ/Might and Magic/Kings Bounty mashup. The game is pretty fun, but after a while, I'm finding I have to take it in small doses as repeating the same actions to win a slightly different map gets very boring (even with maps/shards that have different properties to them, they don't seem to be enough to warrant varying from a proven tactic).

It took me 248 hours to end the campaign - and I chose the quickest way to finish.

If you like to finish your games - beware of the necessary time investment!

The game runs very unstable (release 1.4.5) - during my playthrough I had over 100 crashes to the desktop (seems evenly distributed between "Invalid Pointer Operation" and "Access violation...").
The game might run smoothly for 5 hours or crash 5 times in 30 minutes...

This is so close to being an amazing game that it causes me physical pain. It's that close, but there are a few crippling flaws that just ruin it. First, there's the combat. There are different ranks of creatures, one through four, one being weakest and four being most powerful. The problem with this is, after a certain point, anything below rank three will die in the first turn of battle because the enemy AI consists entirely of 'KILL WEAKEST CHARACTER'. The combat maps are tiny so forget any sort of strategy, mid and end game opponents can hit you anywhere you stand. Oh, and those opponents are almost always all one to nine monsters, plus nine to twelve wizards. There are three wizard types, and you will see up to a dozen in every single combat.

There are dragons in the game, and you can find them as random encounters. That isn't a problem. A single low level dragon can be beaten, but it's fairly tough unless you come loaded for end game critter hunting with high end, high level units. It's cool. You get an achievement. What isn't cool is that the dragons can spawn in groups of up to six, and all of them in the level 15 range. There might be worse groups out there, but this is literally what invaded one of my provinces in my current game. This isn't something you can fight. I also mean that Literally. You can not defeat these multiple dragon encounters. It isn't possible. You can build an arena in your home province and send heroes to battle in it to gain experience. Why am I mentioning this? because as soon as a hero reaches level ten, the enemy heroes you battle in the arena can also spawn with dragons as minions. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

On the plus side, your units can level up and improve their abilities, but it really doesn't matter, because a lvl 30 tier one unit will still be instagibbed by a lvl 1 tier four. And the upgrade system is utterly worthless as well. Why yes random number generator, I did want to improve my crossbowmans hand to hand skills for the fourth time in a row. No, he doesn't need better ranged attacks, he needs to be able to swing that butterknife he has like a man!

There are hundreds of items you can find, which is nice, but there's almost no storage space for them. You get a tiny little vault that can't be upgraded. It wouldn't be so bad but on the same screen you have access to the merchant window to sell stuff, and hey, if you guessed that had a scroll bar and infinite space in it, go get a cookie or something. You can build an artifact shop so you can buy artifacts, but unfortunately it doesn't cycle through different ones. You get the opportunity to buy three randomly chosen ones and it never changes for the rest of the game. Those three items are pretty much going to be terrible and I really want to chalk it up to being a bug that it doesn't refresh every so often, but it's been like that since release so probably it isn't.

There are four types of hero you can recruit, but you shouldn't bother getting anything but a warrior. The warrior is so much better than the other three it defies belief. Scouts can be useful for the rare encounters designed exclusively to kill warriors, but that's about it. Oh, and yeah, there are encounters designed from the ground up to murder warriors. packs of medusa will petrify you and then poison you, giant spiders will web you down and poison you, giant slugs will poison you if you hit them or vomit poison on you from a distance if you don't.

Edit: Okay, so I finally managed to grind a mage high enough to use a specific spell named 'white magic', and basically, it lets you break the game over your knee like a rotten twig. Two casts will clear virtually any combat encounter of critters, barring the two (the latest update may have added more) creatures who are magic immune. Once you get one cast per combat, better beleive that mage is going straight to lvl 30 since he can now effectively obliterate entire armies. Unconquerable foes turn instantly into big, meaty sacks of free XP. Just load up every unit slot with lvl 1 swordsmen, the enemy creatures/mages/whatever will go and kill them while your mage, free and unharmed, fires magic nukes that hit EVERYTHING ON THE MAP FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE. This is a well balanced, well implimented ability that reduces multiplayer combat to 'whoever goes first wins'. Casting it does a small amount of damage to the mage, but a couple of healers can fix it easily before any monsters that made it to turn two kill them for being a weaker, easier target than the wizard FIRING MAGICAL NUKES AT THEM.

Oh, and I hope you like really, really really loud TING! sounds, because the game plays one over and over at random for no reason I can discern.


Edit: I also hope you don't like loading saved games, because doing that while the game is running will cause the entire thing to crash. Not always, but often enough that I had to mention it.




Shouted at by a dev and I didn't even get an acheivement for it.

-Bought this when feeling nostalgic about Master of Magic / HoMM. I also like CiV and slower, turn-based games sometimes.
-More complex building options than HoMM and in some aspects MoM.. More specifically the City Build menu can be overwhelming to look at for the first time. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of the game - its complexity left me wanting more and more so I would restart a game after losing to tweak the build and see what works best.
-The heroes can be viewed as simple/straightforward - 4 classes. Each time you level you put one point into one skill (out of three offerred).
-Spells are just similar to Heroes of Might & Magic. Build the 4th tower to get the best spells.. except there is a different building for each magic type - there are 6 magic types (I think?) at least as far as buildings / main spells go.
-More complex gameplay & darker theme than Heroes of Might & Magic
-Can't wait to play multiplayer!

This game is really hard to rate. I recommend it because the core game is absolutely great and I love such games in general. I also don't want to harm the devs because they really tried hard and have created a real rough diamond but some mayor design issues will spoil the fun for probably most of the common players!

So I only recommend it to die hard 4x fans with masochistic tendencies and/or you might want to grab it on sale :)

My review became a mini guide so here is the overview and I will post more details in the comments.

Good:
- Very deep 4X game mechanics (with a focus on battles)
- Great turn based battle system (focus on tactics and not luck)
- Good RPG elements regarding the hero/unit development
- Many different units to hire and fight (most or all of the enemy units can also be hired if you are lucky to get an offer)
- Polished graphics and menus
- Nice humor (you can either play a good or evil “god” and the evil options are really funny to read)

Mixed:
- Not many armies to control or cities to build up so micro management doesn’t get out of hand
- Hard to learn even harder to master
- Endless playtime (if you can stand it - might be good for players who rather want to play in doses instead of one huge map/battle)

Bad:
- Tedious game mechanics
- Monotonous game play (most of the time you spend doing the same over and over again until you finally see/find/unlock something new)
- Easy to get stuck in “dead ends” (as long as you haven’t learned how to avoid them or have the patience to wait (for lucky random events or gaining gold/experience over time) or reload/restart)
- Still some bugs (Happened once that an enemy unit was not removed from battlefield and I had to reload the fight)


So what to expect from the game?
I expected another Fallen Enchantress/Warlock - MotA clone but this game plays quite different. There are the same features in place but they are used in a different manner. Think of starting one of the mentioned games. Build/take over your first cities on an isolated island and form your armies, then, when you are ready to conquer the next island: you have to start over.
This is basically happening in Eador. You conquer a "shard" where you face 1-2 enemies (at the first shards) and as soon as you conquered it you lose (mostly) everything you had earned the last hours. The shards do work on a greater scale though. They unlock new buildings/units and give some mild benefits to the starting condition of the next shard. I also can only speak for the first shards because even though I played 16 hours I'm still on my second shard! (+ the good tutorial that took me 3 hours alone) According to the forums there are 80!! shards to conquer - go figure the playtime you need to beat the game. Though I have to say I always fought my battles and didn’t auto resolve them because I’m a control freak and don’t trust the AI so you can decrease playtime a lot by automated battles.
I also don't want to complain about a long playtime but the simple problem here is: motivation. I think it would have been much better to only have like 20 shards but instead increase the rewards you get for conquering each shard and thus give a better feeling of actual progress.
Which leads to the real problem here, because having an extrapolated playtime of 400 hours and making only small steps on your way from shard to shard don't has to be bad in general, but the real issue is: The start of each shard is tedious and often frustrating.

You start with you major city, the only one you can really build up (and if you lose it to an enemy it's game over). Even conquered enemy cities are just better "provinces".
So now you can start constructing buildings from different categories that either increase income, mood, get you access to certain military units, spells or items. You also have to hire a hero because there are no armies without heroes! So the heroes are the real stars of the game and they are significantly better than every other units you get (at least in early game). You can choose from 4 different classes: Warrior, Scout, Commander and Wizard.
The problem is: The hero alone is not able to win most of the fights even right at the start of the game. You need either supporting units, spells or items to make him capable of conquering the provinces around your city. More units sounds like a good idea but they cost money and upkeep and the AI tends to attack the weak units first so they most likely get killed fast. Also when you buy units you don't have much gold left to build up your city. So what happened to me in the first level was that I started with a warrior (because he was great in the tutorial), build up the city and tried to conquer the provinces around me.
When you attack you get a nice text that estimates the outcome of the battle. It also tells you how many units you spotted and which kind of units they are. It is still a little vague because when you spot 8 units of militia and bowmen it makes a great difference if there are 1 or 6 bowmen and you won't know that. So despite the text I at least started every fight and would have lost all of them (tried - failed - reloaded). So my only chance to finally progress in the game would have been to use another (great but overused) feature: Exploring.
Every province (or tile) has a level of exploration. You can send your heroes to explore the tile which will give them experience (very important, but very slow), lets them find locations (most of the time fights that are often too hard to win but bring very important loot and gold/ you can also find shops with special items or units to hire) and expands the province for the population (lowers effects of overpopulation).
So back to my problem: It would have taken ages until I got strong enough to finally start conquering the provinces so I restarted the shard and chose the scout hero. The reason is that ranged combat is a little overpower and the scout alone can win some battles as long as the enemy doesn’t have too many ranged units himself or too strong and fast melee units. I guess you can also use the wizard for that matter (not tried yet) but if you go for a melee character I suggest to invest in spell granting buildings (especially magic missile) so that he can deal some harm from a distance.
So with the scout I was finally able to gain some ground and get the game going. Eventually I was able to hire a second hero (which makes sense because just 1 army to cover ~30 tiles is difficult, especially when the enemy starts attacking).
Which leads to 2 more problems:
First, when you hire a new hero midgame he is starting at level 1. You might have some items and spells available to give him or perhaps even can give him the supporting units from your experienced hero (but then this hero is significantly weaker) but all the easy fights are already done by your experienced hero so there is no (comfortable) way to level him up and make him actually useful. You can only explore and trial and error random fights.
Second: The enemy is really annoying. He often has several heroes (more than you have) and can take every province by just moving on that tile as long as you didn't buy any guards there. The point is that those guards cost money and all they bring is defend the province against a possible hero attack (later on you get access to better units that have more benefits like auto exploring the province or even increasing the income of that province (still less than their upkeep though)). So when you start taking provinces you don’t want to spend your money on hiring guards but rather want to wait until you have an actual frontline. But when you finally have one it usually consists of 4-5 tiles per enemy.

I will continue my description in the comments as the text got cut off here in the middle of my explanation! :(

The idea is interesting but the implementation is lacking. Highly random starting positions can vary the difficulty from "cakewalk" to "impossible," and strategy games should be decided more by your decisions than by randomness. Hero units drive the game, so if your starting area is good, you steamroll the map; if not, you may be able to grind through, provided the enemy hero did not get a steamroll start that lets it one-shot your troops and two-shot your hero. "First OP hero wins" is not an interesting strategy dynamic.

Before each fight, the game evaluates your forces versus your enemies and gives you a difficulty estimate from "no casualties" to "no chance." Whatever math is being done does not compare the units' strengths and weaknesses. You will regularly find impossible "easy" fights and "run away!" fights you can win without taking damage. Between this and the highly random elements, you can see why so many places on the forums advocate save scumming.

I encountered fewer crash bugs than other reviewers did.

It's hard to play a game over 100 hours and then not recommend it. And yet, I can't. I wan't to - but I can't.

You've heard the saying that 'the sum is greater than the parts'; in this game, the parts are greater than the sum. There is such a good game here waiting to 'happen'. Unfortunately, the overall game design is flawed.

Specifically, the size of the 'shards' and the mechanics of the shards hurt the overall game. Because of this, you won't even use most of the best units/buildings/etc. In essence, you've got all this outstanding content that never comes into play bacause of the mechanics of the 'meta-game'.

Nice remake of the one of the best TBS game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1659902713
This is remake of one of my favorites strategy games. You can read my review there:
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198263427469/recommended/235660/

The game basically adds nothing new but brings new graphics. I was confused first 30 minutes of the game but later adapted to new UI and graphics.

Devs left balance, story, mechanics unchaged. I saw onyl 2 differences, they added ability to save/load during the mission. In the original game you just could move 1 turn back with losing final score/resources. Also you can change difficulty during the campaign (it was 1-time choose and play in the original). These things made the game for accessible to new players.

In my opinion, original 2d game is more understandable and more comfortable to play. Yeah, it has outdated graphics with no animations, but it doesn't matter for true TBS fan. But, graphics of the remake can bring new players because it is cute.
I liked design and animations of units. City is a mess.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1659902603
Pros
- More pleasant graphics
- Ability to save/load and change difficulty during the campaign
- Can offer thousands of gaming hours

Cons
- The game can be really confusing at the start
- Got 1 time a critical bug (healed with loading)
- Original game has unoffical but great mode New Horizonts
- More expansive than original game

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1659902675
if you played original Eador, don't but it. YOu won't find anything new here, but if you didn't played Eador Genesis and you fan of TBS games, you can start with it. I recommend it with 50%+ discount.

There is so much here that make this game amazing. I loved the different units and the difficulty of starting off. I loved being able to 100% territories to get more benefits. I loved how there was an overworld with even more shards to take over. As much as I loved this, there was more that I just didn't love.

After spending so many hours on one shard, you start with nothing on the next shard. It feels like a slap in the face. It is supposed to feel like starting another scenario, but there is virtually nothing different from this shard than the last one. Why can't I keep some of my ♥♥♥♥!? What's the point? If I reread my favorite book over and over, or watch the same episode of my favorite show over and over I will still enjoy it, but how often will I want to do this? It will make you go kookoo for coco puffs. That is exactly what this feels like. There may be more enemies and a slightly different layout, but no real variety.

I wanted more from this experience, but I was just left dissapointed. This is fun, but leaves you wanting so much more. This could have been a 10/10 if things were done just a bit differently.

4/10 I wanted to love this, but it just left me wanting a better experience that incorporates all these elements.