Tries to be Heroes III too hard
Now, sadly, Heroes V takes the series a step back. A lot of the new things form Heroes IV are gone: Heroes can no longer do real battle, creatures can no longer move without heroes, the magic system has been stripped down, you can only have one hero per army, the caravan system is gone (which is a real bummer because it added a lot of extra strategy options, you can no longer remote hire creatures from dwellings and so on.
Another thing that has been removed are all the spell descriptions and little bit of text that came up when you found an artifact or found a treasure chest.
For example if you checked out a necromancy spell in IV you got a description of the spell and in what situation it would be useful writtedin by a necromancer. These little descriptions may not seem like much but they were fun to read and made the world seem a little more alive.
It's a pity Nival didn't take the time to implement this in V as well.
The story isn't much better. It's your basic fantasy cliche story - and there's nothing wrong with that - but it just seems so shallow.
In IV the story was interesting and for each mission there were usually several pages of backstory which added some much needed depth.
This is now replaced by short cutsceense that just add minimal information to keep the story going. However, the same, addicting gameplay that has made the series so popular is still there. Other than that Heroes V is a step back that will leave you with a little bit of a bitter taste in your mouth if your an old Heroes fan.