Heroes of Might and Magic V Previews

Both Eurogamer and Celestial Heavens are offering up impressions of Ubisoft and Nival's Heroes of Might and Magic V, after spending some firsthand time in the game's closed beta test. A snip from Eurogamer's article:
The problem with the multiplayer modes in many turn-based games, Decroix explains, is that you often spend a lot of time sitting around and getting bored while you wait for your opponent to make their move. By way of finding a solution to this, the development team came up with the all-new ghost mode.

It works like this: while your opponent is making their decision, you can move your character around a strange, ethereal and very blue version of the game board. As you move around you can take advantage of all sorts of useful options - you can mine gold, put curses on your opponent's troops so their movement is limited, possess neutral creatures and make them join your team and so on.

And a snip from Celestial Heaven's article:
The new interface takes some time to get used to (it reminded me of my frustrating first games of Populous, a very long time ago!), but we have seen some improvements from one phase to another. It requires a little more skills with the mouse than in previous Heroes games, but finding a good combination of mouse movements and keyboard shortcuts usually takes you where you want to go. Testers reported various problems about their ability to see things on the adventure map: the underground was too dark, some objects were blocking the view and it was sometimes easy to miss an enemy stack.