Оценка HoMM V Tribes of the East

still, the game is missing something. and that something is a proper single-player. no matter how you look at it, I haven't finished a single campaign. at most, I got to the 3rd mission of the dungeon in the original.

Among people who have completed all campaigns of various installments and try to be reasonable in their assessments, rather than "I played the third (second, etc.) as a kid and loved it, so everything else is garbage," there is a general consensus that the story of the original fifth game is absolutely unbeatable, but the best individual campaigns are those about Roland and Archibald (the second) and Goldoth (the fourth). The campaigns in Lords and Horde are clearly inferior to the original, but still noticeably ahead of the third game, where the campaigns can only be played out of good old nostalgia.

still, the gameplay in the third was somehow... more diverse, you know? the thing is the maps. the editor there certainly didn't work on templates...

Decent maps for the third game accumulated over the years; in the original package, there aren't that many, or rather, there are few.

and the game itself felt... mmm... easier. I don't know why. maybe more artifacts, terrain, various random factors.

A ton of artifacts and randomness can only be considered a plus when playing against the computer, but that really gets old.

That's the thing; in the "third" game there are a lot of random factors, but here everything follows a set path. If you deviate a bit from the course, you fall behind and your chances of a favorable outcome become very slim. In the "third" game, there were always chances: you suddenly assemble a great "set" and you're on top. Here, there are no such "sets" that can significantly influence the course of the game (I can't say anything about the "dragon set" — I never managed to collect it).

In the fifth game, the options for gameplay and development became considerably greater. Although, for instance, in the third game, a hero had 8 skill slots, 6-7 were non-negotiable, and the last 1-2 were randomly chosen from skills of the "second tier of importance." Some real variability only appeared in TE. And you're wrong about sets; besides the Cloak of the Undead King, none were decisive — Control was decisive. I remember in one game, my friend suddenly assembled the Alliance, but I got the Portal. I immediately broke his shackles, and he had no chance. Random upon random — nothing else. But in the fifth game, there are definitely some cool sets: the dragon one, the dwarf one, the necro one. Any of them greatly increases your chances of winning.

As for comparing the WoG version with the "third" game, it's not even worth talking about — it's night and day. I still remember a lot of interesting games in the "third" (even though some of them took place five to seven years ago), but I haven't had any such memorable games in the "fifth" (and probably never will).

Most likely, you just aren't very good at playing the fifth game. I personally observed how a die-hard third-game fan with similar views was painstakingly and tediously taught the advanced basics of the game for just one faction (the orcs), of course in games where he was getting torn apart. That sparked a desire in him for a rematch in the third game. He created a game, and after a few turns, he killed it himself, saying that after the fifth game, playing the third is impossible, primitive, and uninteresting.