A solid final chapter in the Heroes 5 saga.
I've personally been a fan of the Heroes franchise since Heroes 3 and I must say the H5TE finally seems to beat it (I know allot of players won't agree with me here).
However first things first, the new Orc factions in H5TE fits right in with the other races. It has some interesting units as well as an interesting racial ability called blood rage. The blood rage ability allows all Orc units to accumulate rage points as long as they take aggressive actions (e.g. attack, retaliate cast), these rage points result in a higher damage resistance.
H5TE also implements a new upgrade for each of the already existing units for each faction. This really puts a little more depth into the game play and although not all of these upgrades are that dissimilar to their originals, they do allow for more variation in each army. This way for example; two Haven players could face off having different armies making battles allot more interesting.
The difficulty in H5TE is indeed quite hard which will be especially true to players new to the franchise. Especially in the campaigns you'll find the enemy having quite the advantage over you. The experienced heroes player however will find that H5TE is a great challenge but definitely not to hard.
Besides a new campaign which involves the new Orc faction, the necropolis and academy faction H5TE also has a couple of new single player scenarios and multiplayer maps. This all adds up to a bigger replay value but none of the new maps really stand out.
Multiplayer wise H5TE still isn't the game you'll play online quite as much as you would play an RTS game. The hotseat option and duel mode however make up for this.
All in all H5TE doesn't bring that many innovations to the game and its high difficulty is a definite pain in the behind for any new players hoping to explore the franchise. The game does however expand on the proven ground giving fans who where hungering for more exactly that.
8.5
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Lone_Warrior_66