Heroes 6 feels a bit rushed but still offers a great gaming experience!
I am not going to rate this game in the conventional way by giving separate scores to graphics, sound and such. My rating is based on the quality of the gaming experience Heroes 6 brings me. In other words, I'm going to answer the question: Is Heroes 6 fun to play? Which parts contribute in being it fun to play and which do not?
Just as all the previous installments of HoMM the game is leaning heavily on it's turn-based combat system and once again this is executed brilliantly in Heroes 6. Not much has changed since Heroes 5, but combat feels more fluent, faster and tactical in Heroes 6. The influence of your hero is more apparent in this game than in the other ones, well what would you expect from fully customizable heroes? Yep we are finally able to create our own heroes the way we want. No more forced choices between diplomacy or scouting. When your heroes gains a level you get an ability point which you may spend any way you like in some sort of talent tree. And your hero upgrades carry over to the next map!! Blackhole, big thumbs up character development.
And UBI deserves some credit for not bugging us with nasty DRM troubles. Somehow UBI decided not punish us for playing pirated games, nope…they now reward us for the right thing and that is buying a legitimate copy. Now isn't that nice of UBI? Well in fact it's brilliant because Heroes 6 offers so much more when you're online. Leveling up your hero, completing quests and winning combat generates experience points for your Uplay account which you linked to your copy of Heroes 6. So besides leveling your heroes, you level your own game-avatar which leads to unlocking various cool stuff you can use ingame. The best feature of being online is the ability to use so-called Dynasty weapons which you can level up by using them and gaining experience. The Dynasty weapons are interchangeable throughout different heroes and campaigns so leveling up really means something in Heroes 6.
Unit design is great. And besides the satisfactory graphical design, is discovering the synergy between various units and your hero just plain fun and rewarding.
Playing the campaign is the best way to enjoy Heroes 6 in my opinion. While multiplayer modes such as hot-seat are fun if you like more human intelligence in your game, but the different maps didn't grip me as much as the campaign did. This is mainly because the campaign maps offer you much more than just building your kingdom and start bashing on your enemy's door when you have at least 2k of each unit in your army. The campaign maps are littered with quests which often give nice rewards for completing them. It gives you a great incentive to explore every corner of the map to make sure you didn't miss anything.
The only flaw of this game is that it feels rushed. I don't exactly know how long this game has been in development and frankly that's not important, but the point is that I think that the developers spent all their time creating the game-mechanics and designing units. The story is boring and uninteresting as are the ingame cutscenes, which are clearly created in the world editor. In Heroes 5 (2006) they couldn't pull it off that way but now it's 2011 and that they did it again is just beyond me. Luckily each cutscene comes with a "skip" button to ease your pain. Seriously Blackhole...you could just as well saved that time by adding more text-boxes to explain the mundane plot to me. Putting that aside, I don't think that Blackhole has been testing Heroes 6 properly and/or didn't do anything with feedback generated by the Beta players. The release is totally bugridden. Though the worst ones have been patched shortly after the release and it barely affected my gameplay experience. My projection is that there will be more patches to come because there's a bug-list thread on the official forums which cannot be ignored.
In the end the only thing that counts is that Heroes 6 offers a solid an fun gaming experience. I deducted 2 points for the lack of a decent story and for being sooo 2006 in it's cutscenes. If you had a good time playing Heroes 5 than you will love number 6. End Turn.