I played through the main campaign as the bad guy and the Price of Loyalty expansion. I kinda wanted to try and beat the rest of the campaigns because in some aspects this game is amazing, but at some point this goal became a torture. I have to take a LONG break from this game. I'll explain why, but first I'll try to break down what makes HoMM 2 different from the first entry in the series.

So, on the surface this seems like an improvement and expansion of everything, but with the added complexity, certain patterns emerge.

There are 2 spectra that interact with each other:

1. Army build up vs. Character progression
2. Magician path vs. Commander path

These spectra are felt much stronger here than the first game because every aspect of the game was expanded with more elements. In the first game you were able to kinda do everything, whereas here until the late game you're constantly low on resources. This ends up being a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it forces you to choose a path and makes every playthrough slightly different. On the other hand, the resource scarcity simultaneously kinda chokes this system. Because it gives you many choices, but really the most effective one is still somewhere in the middle. So yeah, you can play many different ways, but you're constantly gonna be losing to your opponent unless you choose the path of balance on both spectra.

Another thing that kinda chokes this system is the ridiculous imbalance. Some units (black dragons) are just superior to everything else in the game, so it only makes sense to play as the faction with that unit. Some spells (dimension door) are too. Pretty much, if you build an army of black dragons and learn dimension door, you're unstoppable.

Still that doesn't stop the gameplay from being insanely addictive, not due to some cheap tricks, but because of how good it is. There's a lot of strategic depth, yet the game is simple enough not to overwhelm you. The visuals and audio are some of the most beautiful in any game ever. And by drawing from a diverse roster of fantasy creatures and environments, the world of the game ends up feeling huge in scope. In addition, with some maps taking forever to beat, each one feels like an epic adventure. Like a world unto itself, not merely a stage in a larger story.

But trying to beat this game is psychological torture. It starts off normal, but becomes sadistically tough in the latter missions of each campaign. And the thing about this game is that it gives you a million chances to recuperate, rebuild an army and attempt to turn the tide. What this means in practice is that some maps will take days, if not weeks to beat. I've genuinely driven myself sick of this game. The main campaign was tolerable, which gave me a false sense of confidence. But Price of Loyalty is just fucking insane. I have no idea how one is supposed to beat it. In the last mission, the red player is running around with hundreds of bone dragons, vampires and liches per each hero and castle.

So I cheated. Summoned deathstacks of black dragons, and to my surprise still managed to lose a couple of battles. I could never get like 300 black dragons through fair means, but the enemy had 300 bone dragons per hero somehow. HOW?

Finally, the thing that led me to give up was two bugs I encountered in that last mission. One was when I was fighting the last castle of the yellow player and he cast a duplicate spell on his mage. I killed the mage and the duplicate disappeared, but continued attacking me. It became like an invisible and invincible enemy with 0 units, I had to bail. The other bug was that the last castle of the red player was simple not attackable. I pointed the context-sensitive cursor at it and it didn't change. No matter where I clicked, my hero would simply run there and do nothing. So I just placed my hero in front of it, hoping the red player would eventually spawn a hero of his own and I'm gonna attack him (which makes it a castle attack if he's in the castle), but he never did. I will still count that as my victory, even if through cheating, but I would say the AI was cheating too.

HoMM 2 is a fantastic game with some major mechanical flaws and unfairly brutal campaigns. I'm not really removing points for the latter because I almost never play campaigns in strategy games, as they're just the same as skirmish/scenarios, with a tacked-on story and arbitrary tasks. But I think the campaigns here really helped bring out all of the game's mechanical flaws to the surface.

EDIT, 20th April 2025: Thought I'd take a long break before returning to it, but, despite the game's flaws, it has a very strong residual presence. As tough as its challenges are, its world is an alluring archetypal fantasy, almost dreamlike. For a game I have no nostalgia for, the attachment I've developed is unparalleled. So I bit my lips and grinded through the last three campaigns. I have to say, these tiny campaigns had some very cool map designs, but the balancing is still insane. Couldn't beat it without cheats, probably ever.