Rest of first day: terrible game - everything takes too long, the system is too stuttery, I have no idea what I'm doing & everything is killing me.

After first day, tweaked PC settings to stop a few aggravating issues, figured out how to maximise some of the game mechanics etc: awesome - I'm playing Might & Magic again!

It really is a good game. As you probably know, it's a throwback to the old school tile movement, not free movement, but with modern graphics. Takes some getting used to, but the game is designed that it's really no longer. Things seem really close & take a while to get there with tile movement, which can be annoying at first, but really no different to free movement which just allows a bigger map & everything is the same time-wise anyway. It just feels like there is a huge world out there & you're restricted to walking along some specific corridors, but parts of MM9 were like that anyway.

The gameplay design is very D&D v3/4, with feats that can be used in battle rather than standard attacks, as well as passive feats that give permanent status bonuses etc.

Few things I would have preferred, including adding notes to the map. It's also tougher: no more keeping your mana in reserve for when you really need it, & just bashing away at everything in the meantime. Your spellcasters will need to be fully involved every round, which makes it a huge potion-fest (although maybe that's just my style). But it is what it is & certainly as good as MM9 so far - probably better. But it's certainly a "new" direction for MM, including new stats that I still haven't quite figured out (no more Might/Intellect/Accuracy/Luck etc).

Extremely annoying is the requirement to play through Ubisoft's Uplay client, including the 8GB day 1 "patch" that takes an hour or two & effectively seems to be the full (current patched) game anyway. But after the initial registration you can play offline for the rest of forever if you like, other than logging in occasionally to update the patches. As expected their data privacy is also crap, I've been spammed & phished constantly since the moment I signed up. But there's no requirement to use your real world email address, so I just gave them the one I use for these things, & gmail is pretty good at filtering them straight to the spam folder anyway.