Surprisingly good!
I loved Dark Messiah of M&M at the time of release. I’ve never gone back later, but for 2-3 months it took to finish its campaign, it was a really cool game. I loved using a variety of tools in my toolset to kill orcs. Lay down some ice on the ground and watch them slip on it, waving their arms to try to maintain balance. Burn them with a fireball spell. Slip behind them and stab them in a satisfying way. Kick them into spikes, kick them off a cliff, kick them when they’re down, kick em all around.
It was the most satisfying first person melee combat game until Skyrim I think. Actually maybe better than Skyrim, I haven’t gone back to compare them.
I would say it (and Dishonored) have much better melee combat than Skyrim. I don’t think the combat is good in any Elder Scrolls game.
That sounds right. Skyrim was just an improvement on previous Elder Scrolls, so I rated it highly based on that, but from what I remember, Dark Messiah was much more satisfying. I haven’t played enough Dishonored to judge that one yet, and the little I did play, I avoided melee combat.
The HOMM4 AI will definitely build up. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes it’s too aggressive for its own good. It also likes to buy lots of heroes. The AI you fought probably did have a good troop stack and hero at one point but attacked a stack of something tougher that destroyed it. What you fought was probably what was leftover. I’ve noticed that certainly happens. It’s just random how maps play out and some maps are certainly designed better than others to help the AI build up.
I will say that the HOMM hero AI is much better than Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. The HOMM AI will actually seek out artifacts and equip them. FE:LH not so much. In the last HOMM4 campaign I played the AI had a single hero with no troops nosing about one of my castles. Aha, easy XP, I thought. So, I sent a half decent hero with a bunch of troops over to take him out. The AI hero was about level 18 and wiped the floor with my troops and hero without breaking a sweat. Later I took him out with my main hero/stack and he was loaded with good artifacts that made him really tough to kill.
Maybe it is less of an issue in the controlled environnment of campaigns, but blame me: I can’t stand HoMM campaigns!
As a skirmish game, spending hours to discover you had won from the start because the AI couldn’t deal with the map design is something that drives me bonkers, and while HoMM4 is only one of many, many culcripts in the strategy genre, it deserves no special treatment in my eyes.