I hadn't really written anything before today. And all a sudden I wrote like 5 reviews. Guess I had some steam to release.

Two reviews I wrote were pretty negative. Both games got quite high reviews everywhere and seriously all the hype about them was pretty overwhelming.

So I thought I'd give them both a try a few weeks ago. 

Civilization IV and Heroes of Might and Magic V.

I'm a fan of both series, so really I was going to try them out anyway, all the hype made me do so sooner.

I'm disappointed. In both games, and as I wrote reviews I realized something: Developers seem to care less and less about gameplay. 
Graphics seem to be more important than anything else. Furthermore they tend to either add countless, practically useless bells and whistles to the game or they decide strip a ton of good features completely, which were there in the previous titles.
 And in the end we have a good looking game which plays like utter garbage. Well, maybe not garbage, but definitely subpar to it's predecessors. 

I expect an improvement over the previous title. I don't really care if there's a new developer, if they purchased the rights, they purchased everything about the previous games. 
So you have different people doing the coding and what-not. That's no excuse to develop an average game.If you have several earlier releases to look for info about the game - what's good, what's bad and what do the fans think - then how come you still manage to end up getting it wrong?

If I'd get the chance I'd like be a consultant on one of these games someday. I'd like to see for myself, how hard would it be to make something that people would like. 
If what I'd make would be a complete flop, then I'd call off my critique, but not before.

To make my point: 

For christs sake - HoMM V has spelling errors! And not just a missing comma or something as trivial as that. Actual words used in wrong context, destroying the sentences and in some places entire texts are missing.

Oh well... Let's hope that both series keep on rolling and bless us with another hit. Civ series hit it's max with Civ II, in my opinion, and HoMM's aced it with HoMM III.

I like those games, but both are seriously old already. I'd like to see that powerful, addictive gameplay make it to the new millennium.