Songs of Conquest

I just grabbed this the other day, and haven't played around all that much so far, but I think this is a real gem in the making. The inspiration should be obvious to anyone who has played the older Heroes of Might and Magic titles, and this game makes it clear that it intentionally builds on that. It's a turn based strategy with an overland map and attendant battle maps, in which you pitch characters commanding fantasy armies against all sorts of foes. There are some new twists here, but the basic formula is pretty much the same. Currently there's a bunch of pre-made maps for play against the AI or other players, as well as two campaigns featuring two of the currently avabilable factions. The pixelated retro-ish style is reminiscent of other reasonably new indie titles such as Songs of Syx and Crying Suns, both excellent games in their separate genres, and it also echoes the style of the early HoMM games. I think it works very well, and I commend the developers for going with it. None of the titles after Heroes of Might and Magic III really managed to capture the same sort of feeling, and I think it partly is the reason why the following titles haven't been as memorable. The sound and music do their job just fine and mesh well with all the rest. What content there is is already very enjoyable, and I look forward to further updates expanding on the sorts of terrain (and hopefully an underground map layer!), as well as on more factions, although the ones already in the game feel quite unique and interesting on their own! Normally I'd say the asking price is a bit steep for an early access title, but I don't think that's the case here. If you loved the early Heroes of Might and Magic games, you'll very probably love this. This is shaping up to be a worthy successor title, and a introduction to this particular sub-genre of turn based strategy games.

Game so far seems to have quite a potential to be a worthy successor to venerable Heroes III. Visuals are nice (though I still have to ask myself why 23 years old Heroes look better), though the map can be a bit too busy and combat phase is lacking due to art style, which was clearly never really meant to be shown up so close. Lack of dedicated town screen is regrettable, but I wouldn't note it as objective negative. Sound design and music is a good - though nothing as memorable as simply epic soundtrack made by Paul Romero. 4 factions are so far nice, with an interesting twist to otherwise typical fantasy base, I especially like the theme of Rana. There definitely needs to be more though, which I suspect will get dealt with as game progresses through the EA. So why just 3 stars? Well, the core of "heroes-like" games is a balance. Which is admittedly very tricky thing to achieve - after all not even HoM&M3 achieved it fully. But there is a difference between fairly balanced game and wholly unbalanced one, with Songs of Conquest sadly falling into the later one (at the time of writing this review!). This should be pointed out, because this is in my eyes a main reason why this game will ultimately succeed or fail.

Super fun game, captures what made the old HOMM games great while being modern and looking stellar.

The game runs just fine on my MacBook Pro (16", 2019) with a 2,6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 CPU (1,5GB internal GPU), 16 GB RAM, macOS Big Sur. I can't play on higher graphics mode without a significant frame drop tho. If you liked the Heroes of Might and Magic series, this is pretty much a must have. It is a well executed spiritual successor to it. It really comes close in terms of look and feel while improving on the old HOMM formula. Most notable improvements: - The battles are more fun, thanks to additional mechanics, like battle map topology, control zones of units and "mana" which is generated each turn of the battle. Those mechanics add quite a lot of depth and lead to more actions packed battles. - The cities and it's buildings are shown on the adventure map, where the player and their opponents can interact with them. - Powerful map editor, which is accessible from the games client. - Story telling is nicely presented. Due to the early access state there are quite a few minor bugs, but I haven't encountered anything game breaking. As the time of writing the game comes with two really fun campaigns. (Tip: Make sure to place all powerful artefacts on the main hero of the campain, as only those will be carried over to the next scenario!)

It's showing a lot of promise already, hopefully the devs can deliver on it! The AI is terrible at the moment but I'll give them a pass since AI is hard and this is early access. Not sure what the current standards for game AI are these days, but this is not even on the level of HOMM3 AI, which was on the cheesy side. Soundtrack is beautiful.