But on the minus side, for some reason Virtuos decided to move away from the traditional Heroes gameplay mechanic, with your hero competing against enemy heroes, and instead tried to make the game more like King’s Bounty, with your hero mostly only having to deal with fixed stacks of neutral creatures.

On the plus side they’re generally well-written and well-acted (and luckily the main exception to the latter disappears for a long stretch of the Necropolis campaign), and they’re much smaller than the original campaigns, which means there’s less repetition. The two campaigns in Shades of Darkness have pluses and minuses.

But otherwise, the Dungeon faction is about the same as every other faction, with a similar mix of unit types.

There’s nothing worse than having a big stack of minotaurs disappear and then wipe out one of your fragile back row stacks. The racial ability of the Dungeon faction allows any of their creatures to hide just like the assassins, which means they can attack for bonus damage and avoid retaliation, and it’s a good ability because it means you have to adjust your strategy when you face them (by, for example, using area-effect spells to hit creatures you can’t see). It focuses on dark elves, and it includes assassins who can hide and backstab, chakram dancers who can hit multiple targets with their looping throws, big and bulky minotaurs, flying manticores, magic-immune black dragons, and more. Shades of Darkness comes with three main additions: a new Dungeon faction plus new campaigns for the Dungeon and Necropolis factions (which is a little odd since Necropolis was also featured in one of the adventure packs, but never mind). I’m not sure if this is an issue with “too many cooks” or if Ubisoft is simply taking the lowest bid for each project, but after marginally favorable reviews for Heroes VI, the franchise has been sliding downhill ever since. And now with Shades of Darkness, the first full expansion pack for the game, the developer is Virtuos. When two adventure packs were added in 2012, the developer was Limbic Entertainment. When Ubisoft released Heroes VI in 2011, the developer was Black Hole Entertainment. The Might & Magic Heroes franchise is turning into a jumble - and not just with how the name has been rearranged.

Heroes of might and magic online reveiw