An broken game that had great potential
1-The unit design varies from mediocre to ugly,many units`s appearance have little to do with their faction background,not counting the new strange armor design that the high leveled units tend to share,also most of the melee units have boring attack animations.
2-The terrain has been improved,now fountains and others things now morph to your faction`s terrain,but now comes the bad part,the terraformed land can confuse you especially at night time(which is already confusing on it own) making you fight enemies you haven`t noticed before.
3-Now the spells and their animations are on par with the older games,even units spells,considering that spells have very interesting descriptions that appear to be quotes from the faction`s gods and their artwork is beautiful.The only bad part is simply the lack of animations for the spells,all spells of the same kind healing for examples, have the same animation,but this can be solved with patches and expansions.
5-Capitals also suffer from bad design,being the imperial capital the only attractive one.
Now we enter what matters the most in a game,the gameplay,in which Akella failed badly:
1-The new grid system was a nice addition ,but was badly implemented simply because all your units may get stuck on some random rock or the enemy receiving power grids for his units,yet the grid made the combat less boring.
2-A very big problem comes from the lack of new things appart from the new node guardians,there hasn`t been a new unit building,only adding some balance to the older ones.
3-The node guardians are without a doubt a upgrade from the older system mainly because they made the game a faster and gave some form to protect you boundaries.
4-Now the AI in this game is horrible,this make nearly impossible to have some fun without the AI bringing off map troops and starting with overpowered units(way to high leveled) who destroy your main hero in less than 10 turns.Let us also count the absurd amount of neutral enemies just to prolong the gameplay.
5-The game also suffers from linearity and bad campaign,being the first a result from taking away boats and the latter a result from lack of bosses and absurd amount of enemies you have to fight,bear in mind they are all high hp enemies.
6-Another problem comes from the way the cities work now,attackers have just to ways to reach the other side,meaning longer fights.Also the new city growth is just not practical,making cities grow as time passes yet return ti smallest size when you lose them.
7-The last part is a reference to how buggy this game is,there are so many game breaking bugs(losing your capital just to have the enemies,this is very common and sometimes the only fix is restarting the level)or the save game bug,i which you must create a save game file or never be able to save or how about the one where steam downloaders couldn`t play during a long time thanks to CD problems. .There are ones that pisses the **** out of you like potions not stacking,not being able to use abilities at the first turn,items disappearing and many others.When you take this game was released in Russia before the international release,there is no excuse for such bugs.
As you can see this game had a good promise,but failed and in the end you have a game that is barely playable.