Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia

The Good
The different varieties of monsters, castles, and magic spells. The map editor was one of my favorite parts of the game.

The Bad
The Inferno group only has one shooter. If it had one more it would have been my favorite group.

The Bottom Line
You start with a castle and you build it up. You can buy buildings to create men and then recruit them, and you can build your mage guild (place where you learn your spells). When you have acquired an adequete army you can try to take over the world!

The Good
Audiovisuals are the best bet of HoMM3. Graphically is pleasant, and creatures are well designed and animated (and it's a TBS game). Music is also excellent, and sound effects don't fall from the standard.

The Bad
Replayability suffers greatly from repetitive gameplay. Although there are many campaigns to choose from, every game quickly becomes the same as the previous. It's a matter of improving your cities as soon as possible, therefore improving your creatures. Then, raise as many creatures as you can: in battle, your best chance is outnumber the enemy, even with weaker units. But most important is to find the best hero/monster/spell combination (like regenerating vampires under command of a hero with Vampire specialty). Once found, the game becomes easy even at the King level.

I don't understand also why forests and hills block travel completely: It's a poor way of simplifying and I think shows the designers paid more attention to visual aspects than to game itself. The list of spells is far from being large, and creatures are actually half of the total, as "minor" versions quickly become obsolete.

Supposedly, the Map Editor expands replayability, but making your own scenario needs patience, too much patience. And what's the fun of exploring a world you already know from head to toes? Perhaps playing maps created by others... but as I said every game is the same.

The Bottom Line
Nothing more to say... I think HoMM3 may appeal more to RPG gamers than Strategy ones, as it focus on Heroes (curiously), and has a strong Fantasy paper-and-pencil RPG feeling.

The Good
It flows. When playing HoMM3, you don't waste your time on minor things like extensive resource managment or deep experiance calculations, you simply play the game. The interface is clear, straight forward and easy to learn, and I believe it's the most powerful feature of the game.
Other nice additions- Excellent sound in .mp3 mode, so you'll be able to play it even while not playing the game, averge graphic and a good AI, that'll require some time to defeat.

The Bad
The game is almost identical to the other games on the series. The graphics are very similar, and most of the objects weren't changed at all, other than increasing their resolution a bit. Some of the armies are clearly better than the others, and on lower difficulty levels you can easily reach some of their more powerful units on the 1st or 2nd turn.
The campaign is terrible. The story is childish and uninteresting, each of the scenarios is easy and straight forward, and there is no real challange.
The greatest problem of the game is its multiplayer. Since it's a turn based games, you may wait long hours waiting for the other players to play, and for a game which supports up to eight players this can be a long wait... Actually, me and my friends started playing Talisman between our turns.

The Bottom Line
Although the game has many flaws, the single-player (and hotseat for up to three players) is f-u-n, and it's worth buying just for that.