First a fair warning for those who don't know: I like HoMM 4 and what it brought to the heroes of Might and Magic series. And I wanted to see a further development of the aspects therein, especially the expanded role of the heroes themselves battles. So when it was known that ubisoft was making HoMM 5, and they even wanted suggestions from fans on how to do it, I jumped on the oppurtunity and participated among the rest of the community in bringing forth ideas. But as time passed and info about the game got out it seemed like Nival didn't like H4 one bit and wanted nothing to do with it in terms of features for H5. And eventually the game was so far along that any hope of changes seemed futile. I participated in the beta at the start but quickly lost patience with it, seing as how I disagreed with the game at large and it was quite unplayable in terms of performance and stability.
But that is all water under the bridge, and after a time of sulking and shouting "H3 CLONE, BOOOH!" from the sidelines I thought that fine, they may not make it like I would have but it could still be an ok game if done properly. Afterall, H3 which nival is so fond of is a really good game, and there are new features in H5 not seen in any of the previous games.
And this is where things start to fall apart, again, for me. First and foremost because the game was released in a very unfinished state, as shown not primarily because of the numerous small bugs (which is to be expected in all new games, though it certainly doesn't help), but more from the lack of documentation, ingame and in manual form, the shortage of playable maps, and the lack of a key feature of HoMM: the map editor.
Now many actual features of the game are quite allright. The town lineups suffer the same "Must have upgrade on all creatures"-syndrome that H3 have, but they do seem more varied; buildings get quite expensive further up and you find yourself playing quite some time with the unupgraded versions, much more so than in H3. One might of course argue that the story of the towns, with dragons, dragons, more dragons, good elves vs bad elves and dragons and so on is a tad on the unoriginal side, but on the other hand I wouldn't want their grubby hands sullying the stories of the proper HoMM\MM universe either
Then there's the doing away with battle in rounds in favour of a purely initiative-driven system, where each creature acts as often as their initiative allows compared with the other creatures. Now I for one think that having rounds where all get their turn is best, but this new system works too, and opens up some new possibilites. My biggest concern here is that high initiative gets so extremely important, with the fast units getting many turns before the slow ones have gotten even one. But that's a balance issue, and can be tweaked if imbalances show themselves over time.
And not to mention the skillsystem, which is in my opinion the only gem in this heap. There is plenty of room for improvement, but there's no denying that the skill system is quite interesting, with good room for experimentation and customization of your hero. And with some of the more advanced skills requireing several others to obtain, there'll be new things to try out for quite some time, compared to the skills of previous games.
But then it's time for the bad things, where there are several disturbing issues. For one thing, there's the disinclusion of several features new to H4 that was generally viewed as positive, compared to the more controversial issues like fighting heroes and simultaneous retaliation. I am of course referring to caravans and the ability to flag resourcedwellings other than mines, so as to not have to run around constantly to pick up creatures and resources around the map. It is for me quite a mystery why these things aren't included, especially since it was a stated goal in the development of H5 to speed up the gameplay. It takes considerable time to run around to pick up stuff, and it gets very boring very soon. Having it automated\doable through structures like the caravan in H4 would be a good way to actually speed up gameplay. As opposed to removing various popup windows ingame like in H5, so that info that you might want to actually obtain instead flutter by in some small numbers that gets lost most of the time anyway. The increase in speed here seem quite miniscule, and you loose the option to view a lot of info. Some of us actually like to have the option to know exactly what goes on ingame. Also the outstanding lack of info on what things like artifacts and spells\effects thereof actually do ingame seem to hint that nival works under the policy that this is on a need to know basis, and the player doesn't need to know. This last issue is now presumeably being remedied through patching, but it should have been there in the first place, it shouldn't be added as an afterthought after fans complaining about it.
And on the subject of "speeding up" gameplay, there's the delightful interface of H5. It is, by and large, dreadful. Now, my main complaint here is that it seems nival is of the opinion that showing of 3d graphics is more important than functionality. Take the heroscreen now. You see the info window covering about 1\3 of the screen. Then there's a large model of the hero covering half the screen. The hero doesn't do anything. He doesn't perform a pantomime version of the info you're after. He just sits\stands there, looking 3d'y. Meanwhile, to find the info you're after you often have to use on of the submenus in the small infowindow. Now, I'm pretty sure that if they had percieved the thought that maybe, just maybe, a large 3d model of the hero is slightly unnecessary in that place, they could have gotten all the info into one window, without the need for subsections. Look at H3 and H4, they have all the info in one window (except spellbook and biography), there is even a paperdoll model of the hero where you can place your artifacts. It is much more functional in those games, and I never once thought to myself that there should really be a model of the hero covering half the screen instead. The townscreen suffers from the same thing; small chart, lots of pointless graphics taking up most of the space. All previous HoMM's use the same functional and aestheticly pleasing buildingchart, that they changed it to what's in H5 is to me quite baffling.
Then there's the issue of overview. On the adventuremap, you have 3d models of trees and buildings and whatnot, where you can swirl the camera around and view them from many angles. My beef with this is that you HAVE to swirl the camera around to see where you are going, and what objects are on the map. Add to that that the scouted area around your hero doesn't update as he moves; you have to stop moving to see what you have explored, and manouvering the adventuremap can be quite frustrating. Some of the same goes for the battlefield, it can sometimes be very hard to get the cursor to mark where you want to attack\cast a spell. You may have to rotate the camera and zoom in, only to find that placing the cursor bang center on the huge square you aim to aim at isn't the way to go. Rather, you sometimes have to balance it on the very edge of the square, for reasons unknown. Also, the battlefield itself is quite a strange affair. Consisting of quite big squares, where each creature takes either 1 or 2x2 squares of space, I find it quite hard to suspend my disbelief when I see that a unicorn actually only uses less than 1\3 of it's allotted 4 squares. Why couldn't it, and the other oblong creatures, have taken up 1x2 squares instead? Other 2x2 creatures justify their space by voluminous clothing alone, like the Lich that presumeably is going straight to a ball after the fight, seeing as it has the ballgown on already.
Of course, many of these things is just a matter of getting used to. But I don't want to
This isn't really a review, and I'm not going to give any "score". But I certainly don't feel any urge to buy this game in the foreseeable future, I have enough shelfed games as it is. Maybe some time later on, when it's patched up and there's a decent mapeditor and an expansion or two, and if I can forget how poorly ubisoft treated it's customers by releasing a far from finished game at full price (not that that is anything new), I might get it (and in case any wiseguys have any grief with me complaining about a game I don't own: I have played it for hours on end with someone who has bought it
)Good to get it of my chest all in one go
PS: sure there are more things to mention, both good and bad, but I think this is long enough.
, third its plenty sun out now, and I dont want to be indoors. Gotta enjoy the sunshine to the fullest, since the weather here changes in one go! 
