Heroes of Might and Magic® 3: Complete

I've been coming back to HOMM3 every year and enjoying the game. With an amazing modding community, you can keep playing forever. There are new stuff coming up and planned for the game even today, and just with the existing mods and campaigns you have many thousands of hours of gameplay left with this game. If I were to take a single game with me on a desert island, even though my favourite game is probably Baldur's Gate 2, this would easily be my choice (with Dwarf Fortress a close second). 4.8/5 is too low for this.

If your pc is experiencing 100% CPU and high temps when running this game, download the "HoMM3 HD" addon (Google it) and set Sys.CPU.ReduceUsage to 1 under the Tweaks tab. You're welcome :-)

This is my favorite of the HOMM series. It includes a Random map generation and you can find several Mod Programs on the Web. The Graphics and Sound are very functional. They have aged a bit, but they still work fine. The game play is turned based strategy with upgradable cities and buildings in the cities. When you actually go into battle, you are at a tactical level of play on a battle ground or in a siege situation. You will have to carefully choose attacks, order of attacks, repositioning you troops and using Support from you Hero. The tactics you use are critical. Save your games often on different slots. (You might have made a serious mistake). Use the tutorial if your new to the game or if your old and can't remember the finer points of the interface. When you first play the game an opening video will play. You will have to wait for it to finish. Once you watch it once, the next time you open the game, you can escape out the video with the ESC key or click the mouse. (There were issues in the past with it always playing the total video every time you opened it, but i believe it is patched. If you have issues with this, go to the GOG Forums. They have lots of ideas). HOMM 3, is my favorite of the HOMM Series. There a collection of stand alone campaigns on GOG that are based on HOMM3. They are the "Heroes Chronicles Complete". Like others have said, it is very, very replayable with the Random Generators and Map Editors and all the extras available on 3rd party sites of the Web. Play on Heroes! Sluggo

You know how Christopher Reeve is the quintessential Superman or how Tom Baker is THE Doctor? That's what you have here in terms of the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise. This is the entry where the formula that the previous 2 entries built up hit its peak, and where later entries tried to emulate, but couldn't quite reach. No, I'm not saying this is a perfect game. But it is the perfect HoMM game. This is the most balanced and versatile of the series. The units are entertaining, the music is never dull, and there is no wasted potential. This is quite simply a masterpiece even after 20+ years (and maybe more when you read this review). And given that this is the complete package with the expansions, you cannot really ask for more bang for the buck.

I first played homm3 around when it first came out. I didn't understand it, was terrible at it. It is mostly unforgiving of bad strategy and wasn't easy to get into even though I really liked the gameplay. Years later, I bought the Complete version of the game here on GOG and eventually played through all the included campaigns. Every couple of years I've gone back to it, but this has been the year where I've really gotten into trying to get better at the game. The reason? The Horn of the Abyss and HD+ mods and watching people stream competitive homm3 gameplay! The game is now easily among my top 3 favorites of all time. While neither mod is necessary to enjoy the game, the HD+ mod alone will reinvigorate gameplay with tons of quality of life updates. It includes menu changes including hot keys to split unit stacks and transfer armies between heroes, artifact swaps and a way to save artifact "costumes", battle speed options, auto-combat that can be replayed or canceled easily, proper graphical scaling for modern resolutions and aspect ratios, and many more useful things. HOTA adds another town faction, a number of tweaks and balances to heroes skills and gameplay and a set of very difficult campaigns as well as being oft-used for online competitive play. Even without these mods, homm3 is a masterpiece, but the GOG Complete version combined with these two mods has brought me back to the game for hundreds of hours of gameplay. The HD+ mod should probably be considered a necessity because of UI changes that I consider essential, but it's also great because if HOTA is installed one can still choose the vanilla game version as the executable in the launcher and play the original campaigns. It's absolutely brilliant.