Russia's Heroes of Might and Magic

This is the game that landed Nival the job developing HoMM5. The similarities are hard to ignore. Visually, you'd struggle to tell the difference, perhaps except for the much darker color palette. The interface is very similar too, the circular action-menu, the chunky buttons. In terms of the gameplay there's plenty of differences though.

Just like in HoMM you have castles and heroes, but here there's very little castle-management. It's much more focused on moving around the map, fighting and leveling-up. To give the credit where it's due, the game does a great job at keeping things concise and intuitive. The way you would pick between two skills upon level-up in HoMM3, you pick between three skills here. The game doesn't overwhelm you with hundreds of menus and submenus, everything is very self-explanatory and takes seconds to figure out.

The combat, which is this game's main focus, is very different from HoMM. First of all, you don't move around the battlefield, much like in Disciples. Second of all, you have to summon all your creatures. And lastly, but most importantly, your skills (including the summoning ones) are given out to you like cards. Every turn you get a new deck. It's kind of a fun little experiment and got an interesting dynamism to it. I would compare it to tic-tac-toe. There's much more immediacy and less planning ahead. Sometimes your opponent will summon a creature and you get to choose between spawning your own to potentially attack them or to cast a spell that would prevent the enemy creature from attacking you. You can't cast just any spell either. Every turn you get a limited amount of mana (here called "ether") and you have to do with what you have.

However, as fun as this system is, I'd be lying if I said it's very interesting. The whole game definitely has much less strategic depth than something like HoMM because of it and the almost complete lack of castle-management. It also has less of a sense of presence, since castles were one of the most visually-memorable aspects of HoMM. Another thing I majorly dislike here, and this is something that unfortunately made its way into HoMM5, is how linear the map-design is. Just like in HoMM5, it's a bunch of tunnels/mazes. It's not as much of a problem here though cause the game is already much more casual than HoMM.

Overall, I don't think it's a bad game at all. And, for a Russian game, it has an incredible amount of polish (not Polish as in Poland, but polish as in it's very fleshed out). It's sort of like Heroes-lite. If you're not expecting more out of it, you're gonna have fun with it.