Fallen Knight

Completed both missions. Heart of Chaos first, and I didn't even look at the description. I liked it a lot. Heart of Chaos is a fairly simple but simultaneously interesting campaign; there's interactivity and the heroes are pleasant. I really liked that in some cases, you can just crack everyone's skulls open, like with Archidemon. Chaos is a very strong character, his special ability works very cool, but for me, the cave dweller wouldn't summon; a fireball just flew out of nowhere. With other spells, there wasn't even an animation—parts of the troops were just subtracted and that was it. But that isn't important. I enjoyed the mission, except, of course, for the final boss. That... well, it can't be described without swearing. He has max luck and morale—I have -10 -10. Buffs are constantly being cast on him—I have debuffs on all my troops. On top of that, he can cast magic manually beyond limits, and since he has some abnormally sized army, they both gate in and reinforcements arrive from nowhere on top of that. Man, I suffered with him; he's not a boss, but a player-humiliation machine. But overall, the mission is very enjoyable.

I liked Fallen Knight a bit more, although it has more downsides. I played as the imbalanced Dominik, because Hafad is some kind of mistake of nature who casts a fairly weak plague and not even on everyone. Dominik, however, wipes everything out, especially with skeleton archers and imperial laborers firing twice in a row... yes, with soldier's luck—you can keep TWO detachments in a stun simultaneously. Hafad also has -10 morale, although towards the middle of the game, people quickly turn into undead. The mission is quite hardcore, especially if you screw up like I did—first capturing the central castle, and then running to finish off the last one on the right. The pressure was so great that I had to replay. I don't understand why there were so many complaints about Alaric and that Woman. The woman didn't revive after death and the destruction of the castle, and I simply locked Alaric away by giving all the unnecessary melee units (reapers, dragons, zombizis) to one of the level 17 heroes bought from the enemy. In the end, after a couple of months of walking back and forth, Alaric tried to attack my little friend, was defeated shamefully, and after that didn't even crawl out of the castle. That amused me. Overall, the map is awesome, with lots of multi-stage interactivity that isn't useless. The two-stage siege at the end is sheer luxury, although it was unpleasant for me to play as that pathetic Hafad. It's a real shame how they wasted Chaos; I honestly didn't understand his role in the plot if he just died in the middle of the map? Even the cutscene from the end of his mission—where the Holy Word eventually flew in from nowhere... but Chaos died, or what happened exactly? And what was that imp then; they probably won't reveal the secret since Chaos is dead.

Overall, the map is fairly easy, except for the fight with the library keeper—but the imbalanced Sandro's cloak + mind control with berserk decides there... and the castle with mages, but mind control decided there too... and in the dwarf castle as well...

Yeah, overall I think it's impossible to complete without darkness, especially if you destroy undead cities like I did—otherwise there simply aren't enough troops for all the breakthroughs. I suffered most with Chaos and the library defender. Chaos is just f***ing hell; he made me remember how the final boss of his scenario humiliated me. But the berserker and clever mind controls solved it. In the struggle with the keeper, I simply put only dragons in the corner, and I cast mind controls and berserks on the undead. That's how I won. The dwarves are a joke; Arkat's dragons never left the stun, and I had nothing to remove the evasion.

I also liked the final twist. Until the very end, I thought Hafad would smack Dominik in the face and toss him to die, but it turns out there are such tricks. (Yes, Dominik's ghost proved nothing to me; drooling, I thought it was some other Dominik).

What I didn't like is the mandatory fight specifically as Hafad in some battles—I don't understand why, this pathetic invalid sat in the Shrine the whole mission at level 1. Also, when loading a save—often you just can't talk to NPCs, especially the bandit leader at the very beginning—I couldn't even activate the side quest the second and subsequent times. I also liked the units on their structures; archers on the towers are exactly what Heroes 5 lacked to be ideal. Hafad's Avatar of Death is also quite cool. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this mission, even more than Heart of Chaos; I spent a long time reading descriptions and examining unit models. I really liked the redesign of most human units for the new green archetype, as well as the redesign of old units—like the skeletons with double shot.