Heroes of Might and Magic IV - sure, it's not like other heroes games, but that doesn't stop it from having interesting and, possibly, superior gameplay. I dunno how good it is in multiplayer, but I always viewed it as a strategy/RPG singleplayer hybrid and it never failed to deliver in this part - game's tactical and character options are so much broader than its predecessors that you could probably write a beefy article on their description only. You just have more choices there - what combination of skills to gain for your hero (that's more of a choice than in 1-3 since almost all of the skills, with the exception of some of the 4th ones, are potent), what combination of heros to get, which monster dwellings to build (this one could be better - some of the choices were badly balanced), which spells to use (because suddenly they stopped being either broken or useless and started to feel balanced, more or less), which items and artifacts to use... I've just always found that with this broader approach the game was more interesting to play and replay, because even if there was a battle seemingly impossible to win, you could always search through this vast bag of tricks, find the right one and do the improbable. Maybe they shouldn't have named it as Heroes of M&M, maybe they should've some another brand, Warlords of M&M or whatever and then the reception would've been softer (and, of course, having a longer, un-rushed development cycle and better addons would've helped too), but still, that's a good game and most of the critique I see towards it in the net is really, really moronic.
