Heroes of Might and Magic® 3: Complete

One cannot praise this game enough. The atmosphere, gameplay, music, graphics, setting, available content, community, mods… everything is top-notch. It can be played "professionally" or casually. The game can be stressful or very relaxing, depending on the map / game mode / difficulty settings. So let's try to point out some drawbacks: — It's not well-balanced (at least without the mods). This game is not StarCraft — it was not designed to be an e-sport. As such, expect some skills/factions to be just "worse" playwise. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to play, just don't expect an absolute fairness. — "Professional gamers" may find it too simple — especially the hero development is quite simplistic and there are no so many meta-strategies to learn. To be fair, it changed a bit in the recent mods, especially the most popular mod Horn of the Abbyss made things more interesting with their latest update. — The campaign has a bit erratic difficulty curve. The maps are either too easy, or too difficult. It has never bothered me, but some newcomers may not be amused… More about newcomers below… A brief note for people, who want to start their adventure in HoMM3: I have seen a comment that gave this game one star because of the high difficulty. To be fair — the campaign may be too difficult for the beginners. It's much better to begin with standalone scenarios and only then move to the campaign. In a standalone map, the game is symmetric, and your opponent doesn't have an advantage over you (unless you download some maps from the internet). Moreover, lowering down the difficulty may help in the beginning. However, the best way to learn/experience the game is to play it together! Either against each other or in co-operation. The hot-seat mode is outstanding, and it can be fun for the whole family or at least for a couple of friends. I always play the game with my significant other ;)

Played it when it was new, and I still return to it a few times a year.

I'm a big fan of strategy games and always have been. First played Heroes 2 at a friend's house as a kid and it took me a while to understand the gameplay. Once I did, I preferred it over almost all other turn based games. I wasn't even a turn based game fan, but this game made me one. I originally bought this game in 1999 when it came out as a kid. It still holds it's same charm. It's an easy 10/10 for me because there isn't really much more they could have done other than maybe adding another town or two, but there's already 9 towns and each one is cool in it's own right if you know how to use the better units of the town. The music is maybe the best of any game... Not sure. I think some of the Zelda games beat it in terms of music, but it's top 10 best of all time for me. I still play this game occasionally today and still enjoy it as I did years ago. Sometimes I'll use the map editor to make a map for fun.

HoMM 3 is one of my favorite games ever! The year 2021 is over and I still like to play this gem!

A timeless classic. What more do you want?