The game itself is meh, not good enough to review. What really makes it shine is the heroes 7.5 mod. A group of dedicated people have spent tens of thousands of hours making the game what it could have been. Most of the mechanics are improved, thousands of bugs fixed, and 5 (!) new castles were added, including 2 that are completely conceptually new to the franchise. They are still improving the game, and the discord community is quite active. This up-vote is is only possible because of their work. Without it, the bugs and game-play is just not worth it.

Before buying this game, you have to understand the state it is in. Things not to expect,
- Animated cutscenes
- UI with decent usability
- Character models worthy of 2015
- Character animations worthy of 2015
- Progressive campaign
- Character customisation during campaign


Cutscenes are "animated", but show frozen models, with speech laid on top.


Using the game feels clunky, you will often accidentally stop your hero mid stride because you accidentally clicked twice on the target, when you should have clicked once. Or your hero doesn't move, because you should have clicked twice when you clicked once.


It doesn't seem that there has been a User Experience designer involved in the development of this game, there are too many basic usability issues. Such as that you can't bring up a town screen by clicking on a town. It took me nearly 10 minutes to figure out that you need to double click the little town name on the bottom left to do that. Ridiculous. That's just one example, expect a lot more like that.


The character models and animations certainly look dated, and many look like they are reused directly from Hereoes VI. Most of the time, you'll notice that Heroes VI had much better character models though. Models are small in battles, so you don't see the details (maybe this is for the best, as the details are not that great). The entire game has a washed, grainy feel to it that takes away from the "Heroes feel". Heroes should be lush, with powerful colors, to immerse you into this fantasy world with its multitude of colorful, odd beings. This is not the case. You get sort of the same feel as when opening a spreadsheet or something. The delightfulness is clearly missing. There's a sparse, somewhat empty feeling to it.


The animations are clearly a step down from Heroes VI. For example, the Centurion will bash his shield at the opponent, then stick his spear in it, and only about half a second after BOTH attacks are completed does the target react and make some kind of motion. Not immersive.


The campaign is not progressive. I. e., it doesn't build a story for you to follow, but rather it's just a few short stories that you can play through in any order you want. Personally, I would be fine with this, if everything else had been good.


Same with character customisation, you start out with predesigned characters, sometimes at level 0, for other scenarios at level 30, which may annoy some people, but would have been fine if the game was otherwise up to snuff. Of course it isn't.


The good things are: It's a new instalment of Heroes! For people like me, who grew up with it and love it, this is great. The maps have depth to them visually, which is fun. Castles can be in valleys and so on (but the washed out, derelict feeling that I mentioned earlier detracts from this). Skills feel slightly more useful than in the last Heroes. They've taken some time to groom the skill set. On the other hand, it's not the glory that was Heroes V.


If you're fine with all this, then this game might be for you. The truth is however, that Ubisoft again is trying to get away with minimum effort. What I don't get is, do these people take no pride in what they do? Does it feel good to crank out one half-assed effort after another? Is it a matter of competence, do they not have the right people? Is everyone working on the game too junior? Or is it a conscious strategy from the management?


Don't they want praise from the fans? Why aren't they creating it with "game of the year" firmly fixed in their minds? I simply don't get how someone could be satisfied with creating something with this level of indifference. That can't be a satisfying way to live your life. If you don't like the series, for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake, sell it to some studio who DOES love it.

It comes down to this: those who grow up with this game now, as I grew up with the original series, are NOT going to love it. It is not loved by its developers, and that transmits through to us, loud and clear.

Unplayably buggy. Even after multiple patches, characters often lose all assigned skills after loading a game. Campaign is broken in multiple places making it unfinishable. I payed AAA prices for a game that should still be in beta. I feel conned.

I've held off writing a review of this game for a few weeks now as I've thought about what I wanted to put in a review along with a recommendation TO purchase this game. However, the more I have played this game, the more I have come to the conclusion that I cannot in good faith recommend this game in its current state.

I am a longtime fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. I was introduced to the franchise with HOMM2 and instantly hooked. Heroes 3 holds a dear place in my memory. It was the game a friend and I would sneak away from school during lunch in order to play hotseat. I didn't play much 4 but 5 and 6 were both extensively played. The hours total on my steam account do not count the much larger part of hours I spent on the titles before linking them to my steam account.

Anyways, I held off purchasing this game for a long time because of the negative recommendations I read on forums and from a friend who played during the betas. I ended up purchasing it the night before the release because I am a huge fan of the series and felt like it could scratch an itch for me.

I started with the Stronghold campaign and played through without any issues. I was one of the few who had no CTD or game ending bugs. I read the negativity on the forums and just attributed it to bad luck or people with an axe to grind. I then proceeded to play the Haven campaign with a couple of game ending bugs and CTDs. I gave up and then tried to Dungeon campaign ( my favorite faction) and couldn't get through a first level of the campaign. I struggled through the Sylvan campaign but eventually was able to beat it. Now, on the Necro campaign, I think I'm calling it quits until this game is fixed. Corrupted saves means that I cannot load up a mission I have been working on and complete it. The game has no way for me to restart a mission when all the saves are corrupted so I cannot do anything to restart a mission unless I restart a campaign entirely. I'm sorry, I'm on mission 4 of necro, I don't want to restart the entire campaign. Through all these issues, the game has slowly worn away my patience and enthusiasm so that now, I don't want to spend a huge amount of time loading only to have a CTD while loading a save.

Look, the game has great bones. Once this game is polished, it has the potential to be one of the top entires within the series. I think the developers took the game in a good direction BUT the game has far too many bugs in it to be released. When the game is working, I love it. When it isn't, I am incredibly frustrated. I want to play a heroes game and this game is not in the condition that I can reliably play the game.

I plan to change this recommendation once these bugs have been ironed out. I like the communication the developers have had on this forum and others about their plans. Free content to be released, fixing issues and balancing things show that the developers are interested in the long term health of this game. However, the game is currently in a state that will frustrate many, even among the most hardcore of HOMM fans.

Check back in on this game in a month or two. I hope that it will be in a much better state and you will be happy with the purchase. I do not regret my purchase because I see the potential the game has but I cannot recommend someone to purchase a game and then wait a month or two until it is in a more playable format. As of now, the developers have some work to do in order to fix the amount of good will they have burnt through.

I have played and paid for all of the Heroes of Might & Magic games over the years.
I have enjoyed them very much (in spite of UPlay).
However,
Today UPlay decided to update thier EULA to include not only personal data mining and distribution but, permission to popup adds in the middle of your games! After reading this new EULA, I am afraid that I will no longer purchase or play any games provided by UPlay.
The personal data mining trend is going too far in all of our software and I am done with it even if it means no more internet.

I will miss these games.

Severe stability issues get in the way of what should have been an excellent economy building RPG.

There are a large number of threads here and on the Ubi forums discussing game-breaking bugs and system compatability errors. In my case, the game uses 100% of the system disk throughput for 10 minutes while loading saved games, and then crashes silently. Across the board, for various reasons, stability seems to be a major problem with the game client.

When it does run without loading a game, it uses ~6GB of RAM and shows mediocre performance, which is hard to understand for a game with such unremarkable technical and graphical ambition. Any 4X game, including any from Ubi's own wonderful Anno franchise, provides a much larger and more complex world at a much lower RAM footprint and with better overall performance.

As much as I hate bringing price into any discussion about games, it should be said that $50 for a game that clearly has serious technical faults (even without considering the vast number of problems preventing people from even playing it) is unreasonable, especially when you consider how high the bar has been set for indie developers in the $15 range. Issues like this would break the reputation of any lesser franchise almost immediately. I do regret purchasing this game, and I'm afraid I can't say much positive about the developers until the stability issues are resolved.

"Things sure aint what they used to be" After 66 hours of gameplay, thats the conclusion I have come to.

If you never played heroes III or heroes V, you wouldnt know what you are missing... Wait yes you would. How about any semblence of a finished game?

This game is so glitchy I am consdering putting my law degree to work and starting a class action lawsuit... seriously.

Hero stat boosting items dont work, patch 1.5 made it so any skills you progress somehow are forgotten and you cant reselect them. to bad level 30 hero...

Remember the tears of Asha? It used to be avalaible on all maps in heroes V. Now only 1 or two maps have it in this game and you win as soon as you build it. What is the point of having boons attached to building it if you automatically win when you do???

I hate paying $60 for a game that doesnt even work. Frankly I am astonished that Ubisoft put this game out. Never again. No matter how much a game is hyped or seems like it will suck me back into my gaming of yesteryear, if it has an UBIsoft logo on it. I will not purchase it.

Historically, I've played nearly every HoMM game out there --- Started on 2, moved to 3, struggled through 4 (but came to like it and its music), enjoyed 5 (more like 3.1) and pre-ordered 6 (with my first monies as a working student).
After the absolutely shoddy quality of 6 - and I'm talking about misspelling DRAGON (seriously, DRAGON - that's like the main feature of this game) and instead writing DARGON (like the Noble gas with a D) in the f%^&* artbook for pre-ordered customers. With this I gave up on buying 7 early and waited for a special - eventually buying it for half the price. I also intended to wait for all the bugs, glitches, etc to be sorted out with the first few patches and then buy it.

I started playing the game despite it having a 50% user review after like a year and 3 patches, and enjoyed it. I didn't like small things like the fact that they removed Dynasty weapons (which made 6 great - but I guess it didn't make sense with regards to the lore of 7; understandable). During my first 40 hours of gameplay, I didn't get many crashes - maybe 5 for the most, and the autosaving always only puts you a day behind - but found a few bugs that weren't game changing.
Overall, I started to really enjoy the story, the lore and the progression of the game.

I decided I wanted to finish up this game before I moved onto others, just for the sake of completion, and started to play the game again recently. I've been getting non-stop graphics bugs during the 3rd campaign of the elves - it's been tough, about every 5 minutes there's a roulette that starts on whether the game is going to continue after a freeze or going to be required to be closed from Task Manager. The reason I know it's a GFx issue is due to the fan speed hitting 100% for like 1 minute prior to the freeze.

At this stage, I'm pretty over it; I will be trying my best to get through it and hopefully enjoy the rest of the game, but while searching today, I found this: https://mmh7.ubi.com/en/blog/post/view/important-announcement-from-the-team
A statement that Ubi will be removing and stopping all support for this game; it's still fully buggy... wtaf.
Looking at the games that Limbic Entertainment (the developer of this game) had developed for Ubi, I see only disappointments. I wish deep down that we get quality developers for 8 --- but it's still Ubisoft... and I'm readying myself for disappointment.

It's like you love chicken, but the only supplier of chicken in your world is a company that always gets it blatantly wrong, and at the end of the day says "Oh you don't like it, give it up, coz we don't give a flyin' f%^&". To be honest, that's the feeling I get from Ubi about HoMM... it's like they give it little to no attention, but refuse to pass it over to someone/some company willing to go the distance and finish and complete a full development of a game, providing support and making sure ♥♥♥♥ works before a release.

I don't know if it's the day and age that has shaped gaming companies to only care about results, or if it's just Ubi that don't care at all - and haven't for the past 6-ish years. I refuse to support Ubi if this keeps going - please release a great 8th game, just to restore balance and justice. You're ultimately stealing from everyone who ever bought this game.

EDIT (2019/06/09):

Being a sucker for punishment, I decided to revisit this game. To my surprise, the crashes have dropped significantly, and this game is quite playable right now. I've enjoyed coming back to it, but the bugs that do exist in the game can easily be "avoided"... like if certain events make the game crash, walk a little bit to the right, save the game, restart the game and voila ... no more crashes. Although irritating, it is definitely worth a try. My only advice at this stage would be to go directly through UPlay instead of Steam - there are a lot more bonuses to going that route - for this reason, I'm keeping the review as a "No" recommendation.
All in all ... I think this is a definite buy for Legacy HoMM, and I wish that future HoMM designs are far more robust and are planned well in the future. Although it pains me to say this, 10/10 would pre-order the next game :D.

If you're anything like me, you hoped that these bad reviews were wrong and that this title would renew the love for the HOMM series that HOMM 3, 2, or even 5 made you feel.

TLDR: bad AI and slow gameplay. Stay away.

It's been said that this game would be the one to restore the old ways of doing things that 3DO and New World Computing had set in place. However, this is just a false promise meant to make you spend money on a cheap product that is glitchy and isn't even fun.

I'll start with the poor AI. It's worse than HOMM 3 AI. Yes you read that correctly, a game from 1999 has better AI than a game from 2015. I played a map on hard difficulty and found no difficulty at all. The AI is so dumb it's laughable. To explain, all of the neutral armies made serious mistakes that didn't even make sense. In battle, enemy melee fighters, for example, make movements that aren't even towards my army. They just made themselves fodder for my archers instead of causing me to take losses. The most annoying AI shortcoming of all, which made combats not challenging to the point of no-fun, was enemy archers defending instead of attacking. When I would move a single melee troop next to them to stop them from shooting the AI would just have the archers defend instead of move or attack to clear their path so they could shoot again. This was on hard difficulty. Don't get me wrong - I want to win but it shouldn't be that easy, especially on hard difficulty. Shouldn't AI maximize my losses on hard difficulty? At least in HOMM 3 that's what would happen. In this game it didn't even do that.

This game feels cheap too. The opening cinematic is a camera panning over stained glass. No nice animation or anything. The fonts are terrible and did I mention the crappy AI? It's also riddled with glitches; e.g. windows supposed to have text have none, creatures disappearing from the battlefield etc. Shouldn't this stuff been weeded out during the open beta that this game had? It really seems as though Ubisoft is just taking advantage of the dedicated fanbase that the HOMM series has and just churning out whatever crap it can slap the name on to make a quick buck.

If you can get past the rest of the garbage AI and poor quality that this game has to offer then you'll have to deal with the long winded slow gameplay that makes the rest of the HOMM franchise look as fast paced as Starcraft 2. In older games you could build up your army and move out quickly if you played intelligently. In Homm 7 there is so much trash in the way and reaching your high level creatures is such a pain (because of the town level system) that you get stuck within your zone control slowly amassing an army to move out just to get stopped by more trash outside of your zone. This change in strategy is amplified by the reduced movement speed of heroes compared to older games.

This game is a disgrace to the HOMM series and I can only hope that my refund request gets accepted. Don't make the same mistake I did, if you want HOMM you'll have to go back to the older games or just be disappointed like me.

While looking colourful and rather flashy in the screenshots, the gameplay is rusty, the units possess less abilities which can be activated and the recruiting system is more clunky. This game is far less developed than its predecessor and would have needed another few months to smoothen out and optimise. Having strongly looked forward to this newest addition to Might & Magic, I am sad to admit that I cannot recommend the game as such, let alone justify its cost. The price to performance ratio is seriously flawed- a first for M&M.