heroes of might and magic III

There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.

I have played it on just about every PC I’ve owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.

With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren’t too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it’s hard to imagine you won’t find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.

Songs of Conquest has you move your horse-riding Casters (the Heroes of its inspiration) and their armies around a world map, using each limited movement point to liberate a new resource, pick up some treasure, get a temporary power-up, or engage in battle. When it’s battle time, you switch to a hexagonal grid, where your troops trade blows and you choose spells so your Caster can help. Win the battle (either manually or with an automatic “quick” decision), unlock a new area, harvest new resources, recruit more troops, and repeat until the map is clear or some other condition is met. You’ll get multiple Casters, new kinds of troops, and tons of new spells and artifacts as you progress, and you’ll follow a very swords-and-dragons story.

The art is a mixture of intentionally granular (and pleasant) pixel art, throwback scroll-and-stone interface elements, and cutscenes and dramatic stills with a deliberate hand-painted look to them. Even if each element looks nice, I’m glad the game mixes it up, and you get a break from each. The properly medieval music seems well done, although it’s at a disadvantage, as my brain is making 45 decisions per minute and tends to block out brass, strings, and choirs.

There are four campaigns in the game, each with its own lands, enemy casters and units, spells, and lots of other new things to uncover and throw into your mental strategy RAM. It’s a good variety, especially combined with the difficulty and other campaign options you can set. Coming to this game from HoMM 3 memories, I’ve found the variety of map items, town/castle building, and Caster types new and engaging. My biggest quibble with the game is that managing the spells and upgrades of the Casters is too rich a field for me, somehow just one rich system over the line. Deciding which type of magic a Caster should specialize in and remembering the huge variety of spells available to put into their quickbar overwhelmed me.

As I noted up top, however, I’m not actually good at these games, I just enjoy the spell they put on me. Songs of Conquest is a rich new chapter for Heroes of Might & Magic fans, but it’s also a good jumping-in point if you’ve never been tempted before by the series with the unwieldy title and harsh difficulty ramp. Unlike your Casters, you can roam about its thousand little things at whatever pace you like.

Listing image by Coffee Stain Publishing