GB Feature: Disciples III: Renaissance Review
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Speaking of the campaigns, Disciples III comes with three of them, one each for the Empire (human faction), the Legions of the Damned (demon faction), and the Elven Alliance (elven faction). The Mountain Clans (dwarven faction) and the Undead Hordes (undead faction) are supposedly going to get campaigns in upcoming expansion packs. Unfortunately, the campaigns aren't very well designed, and they're not a lot of fun to play. The first mission in each campaign tends to be tough, because your enemies get free random squads that make a beeline to attack you, but the other missions are just long, boring slogs, and nothing in them is even remotely challenging. If there was an intriguing story to go along with the campaigns, or some exciting side quests to keep things interesting, or even some fun characters or dialogue, then the campaigns might be bearable, but there aren't. How dull are the campaigns? Most of the towns you capture are named "Neutral Town." Yeah, a lot of thought went into the content.
If being dull wasn't bad enough, Disciples III is also plagued with all sorts of bugs and sloppiness. There aren't any hotkeys. There isn't any way to tab through your leaders. Saved games are shown in alphabetical order and don't include any helpful information like a timestamp or the game turn. Sometimes when enemies cast a spell on you, you're not allowed to cast a spell on your turn. Squad leaders frequently aren't allowed to use their skills during the first turn of a battle. Some enemies (like archons) don't do anything during "quick battles" (or at least I don't think they do anything; the game includes a battle log, but there isn't any way to scroll through it). One spell is named "strid not found." Enemy squads don't have to fight neutral enemies, and so they can run around the map and grab resources far more quickly than you can. And appropriately enough, I couldn't finish the final mission of the final campaign because the last quest broke.
