Heroes of Might and Magic® 3: Complete

It's over $4 cheaper than the crummy HD remake and actually comes with the complete game. Get this, not the demake.

Do not forget to install the HoMM3 HD+ patch available for free on the internet. It solved all compatibility issues I had with the original version, which stopped working after some Windows update.

Enough said. This is the best game of all time. That's not just me telling you this, that's also GOG, because this game gave them so much cash in the bank, it SURPASSED EVEN CYBERPUNK AND THE WITCHER GAMES! I can make the argument that GOG possessing the complete version of this game puts them in a much higher position over Steam with their pathetic HD remake and it's what makes people even download GOG in the first place. It doesn't matter if you have a fridge, a toaster, a car or a computer with some RTX 3060 you can use to play this game, it will work. It also doesn't matter if you only have 100 GB or 100 TB space left, this game doesn't need more than a quarter of a GB to radiate with perfection. This is the type of game that: - has earned every single fanatical follower and every single cent spent from launch up until now. - can be classified as the digital equivalent of honey, because if anything gets spoiled here, it's the player, not the game. - can be classified as the digital equivalent of the lobster, as the game is functionally IMMORTAL, for time can't leave a single crack on this masterpiece. - the type of game that even your 10th generation descendant can buy and enjoy the same way you did in a time where you are nothing but a pile of bones. You can play games like LoL and Dota and be frustrated because of some feeders ruining your games, you can play digital card games like Yugioh Duel Links and Hearthstone and be frustrated because you bricked, but Heroes of Might and Magic 3 will never frustrate you and it will never destroy your satisfaction. To say that this is an amazing game is a huge understatement, its creation should be in history books as this game is a marvel of gaming brilliance in and off itself.

Heroes of Might and Magic III is one my all-time favorites in the fantasy RTS genre. Its enormous scale (the number of campaigns, scenarios and the huge amount of player-created content, downloadable in the WWW) is overwhelming, its strategic depth allows years of fun, and the 2D-graphics with the great soundtrack creates a great atmosphere, to make you feel immersed in a realm of magic, honour, glory and fairytale. In 2003, I bought this game the first time, years after its initial release. In 2005, I bought it the second time. And now, in 2009 and although I got HoMM V some days ago via Steam (after surprisingly noticing that the fifth part runs rather well on my netbook), I purchased the HoMM III a third time it, here at GOG. Now I am really happy. :)

When Heroes 1 was released on gog, i wrote a review where i commented on the conflict between those who think HOMM 2 is the best and those who think HOMM 3 is the best. Now many people claim that this divded is based mostly on which of them you played first. And that the nostalgia of the "first" Heroes experience is what decides which you like better. In my case, its the other way around. I started off playing HOMM 2, and loved the game, even though i was too young at the time to be any real good at it. However when my Uncle got HOMM 3, I simply got addicted to it. Now there are actualy quite a few reasons i like HOMM 3 better than both its predecessors and all of its successors, and I'm not going to point to the grafics or the scale, but rather first and foremost to the balance. This game has 8 different races, and you would expect, that along the way you would get a few factors of unbalance in one or anothers faivor, as was customary in both 1 and 2. However HOMM 3 is supriseingly very balanced. The 9th race which was added in the second expansion pack, was also rather balanced, but required a more tactical finess than the others. Another area where HOMM 3 excells is in the depth of its story. HOMM 2 had a story that consists of, your brother has killed your family and taken the throne, now you have to take it back. However HOMM 2 was not a bad game, and as another added bonus, HOMM 3 takes everything that was good in HOMM 2 and takes it up a notch. All units can now be upgraded and all of the different races have an ultimate unit that is actualy worth its salt, unlike HOMM 2 and 1 where black dragons instantly owned everything no matter what you did. Also each race is more or less differenciated in style and units, so that while each race is balanced relative to eachother, they still are varried and different from eachother like in 2. And also the overpowered Ghosts of HOMM 2 are finaly gone. HOMM 3 also has a truck load of campaigns that are varried and different, and a real challenge to play, and not simply in the form of cheap impossible odds missions. but by actualy proveing a challenge. While HOMM 2 may actualy have more content in total, its content in the origional version and its first expansion were critisized for being too strait foward and not varried enough. Whereas the last one fixed that matter. In HOMM 3 they fixed this issue from the get go, learning from their mistakes. As a Final boost in HOMM 3's faivor is that it has an awsome sound track. Each castle has its own, fitting sound track that gives each individual castle and environment its own unique feel. While you will get tired of the "start of a new turn" sound after a while, you will be able to put up with it just for all the other ambient sounds and orcestrated music scores the game has to offer. All in all alot of this does come down to the budget, so really its thanks to HOMM 2 that HOMM 3 is so great, as it provided the financial foundries on which HOMM 3 was built on. But that doesn't mean that the better game is not the better game. HOMM 3 IS the best in turms of content, all accrossed the board. So if you can only afford to put out for one of them, Get Heroes of Might and Magic 3. But you should no doubt try out heroes 2 and 1 aswell if you want to explore how it all started. If you are a dedicated fan, you proubably allready own or have owned all the games allready. But hey, 10 dollars for this game, with all its expansions? Thats a deal you can't pass up!