There's a lot to like about Heroes - most of the cast give solid performances and the story is pretty tight and told in a reasonable amount of episodes.
Qin Jun Jie is always a delight, dude is just on another level. Other actors did very well, but I hated their characters (Wang Jialuo). Huang Hao Yue stood apart from the supporting characters - she did great as the young idealistic revolutionary and her scenes with Qin were a high point of the series. Chen Si Che was the unfortunate lackluster important side actress.
The setting is also very interesting, I've not seen any other dramas set in this specific period.
The music is surprisingly great - kind of a Chinese rock western mix.
I think my main gripe with the series is the rather extremely uneven tone: the first large part of the story is a fairly fun treasure-hunting adventure mystery. Even if the jianghu characters are a lot more realistic in this and often even the "upright" swordsmen act like bandits, it's still a lot of secret manuals and flying around. And the serious political stuff is sprinkled inbetween, so you do understand we'll have to go there eventually when shit goes down.
But the last few episodes are really different - everything is serious, grim and people die. Because this is about the revolution and revolutionaries don't get to see the fruit of their efforts. How else can they become martyrs of the revolution?
The swelling revolutionary patriotism at the end was almost comical.
I think the moral lesson we can take away from all of this is quite good though - being a cop is a state of mind. RIP, Jialuo, you were an idiot.