It’s been over a decade since the last Heroes of Might & Magic game, and more than 25 since we set foot in the fantasy world of Enroth, the setting of the first three titles in the strategy series. So there is a lot riding on Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, the reboot of the series from developers Unfrozen, backed both by a collaboration between Ubisoft and Hooded Horse, and the series’ creator Jon Van Caneghem. Who better to tell if this venerable and cherished jewel within PC gaming’s crown has polished up nicely than two people who have barely played the series before? Edwin and Julian have been playing the Steam Early Access build ahead of its launch on April 30th.
Bake it away, toys.
Julian: Hey! I played a little bit of Heroes of Might & Magic III in the ’90s. But I found its blend of strategy, RPG mechanics, and turn-based tactics weird and confusing so I went back to Command & Conquer. Knights errant are cool and all, but can they compete with the charms of a mammoth tank? Even Might & Magic’s creator Jon Van Caneghem was lured over to work on C&C in the 2010s, so if anything I was just ahead of the curve…
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Based on my memories of playing more than 20 years ago (and a recent refresher), Olden Era is immediately familiar. You are back in control of a hero or two, moving them around a map cluttered with piles of gold, monsters awaiting your sword, and buildings that buff your leader and their retinue. Once you’ve taken control of a city, you can fill it with buildings that allow you to recruit units, unlock battle spells, and amass cold hard cash.
I’m very early in the campaign, but it plays out much as I remember. Each day, your hero has a pool of movement points they use to travel around the map. You can send them to collect resources and activate buildings, such as shrines that buff your heroes’ skills and camps where you can recruit units to your armies, or if you attack a monster you transition into turn-based battles where you send your retinue into a scrap with the enemy.
Frustratingly, my lack of familiarity with the series means I can’t yet explain why, but I’m not bouncing off the systems like I did when I was younger.
How are you finding it Edwin?
Edwin: I think I avoided Heroes of Might and Magic back in the day because I used to be relatively intolerant of genre hybrids. What the hell are you supposed to be, game? I was innocently trotting my wizard through twinkly forest clearings, and all of a sudden, I have to warp back to the capital to build a palace for some griffons. I cannot fit more than two concepts in my head, sorry.
On firing up Olden Era for the first time, I was a little jarred by the olde worlde presentation and visuals, which put me heavily in mind of those sleazy Hero Wars adverts on Youtube. Also Shrek, if it weren’t a parody: on the city screens for the bog-standard human faction, for example, you can hear choirs singing “glorious” in the background, and it does feel a Bit Much. The maps are inelegantly heaped with gold, gems and other valuables for your heroes to collect. At a glance, they could be from some mobile gacha fest. “Ugh,” I said to myself, stuffing my wizard’s pockets with diamonds, while trying to persuade my griffons to level up. “UGH.” But then I played a full couple of hours and found that I was really enjoying myself.
The magpie-friendly presentation is more innocent than it seems. HOMM’s world is like a kid’s treasure map, a gorgeous cramming-together of woodlands, deserts, mountains, lakes and pop-up buildings flush with animate minutiae such as dragons circling ruins or chickens clucking by windmills. Zoom in and you can hear stuff like golems hammering iron in a hillside forge, or the cheering troops of enemy heroes. It bustles, and I do love me a bustle.
In terms of the game flow, I’m finding city customisation a slight drag. You’ll own several cities and there’s plenty of overlap right now in terms of upgrades. But I’m very much enjoying managing my different hero armies and kitting them out for specific opponents. I’ve got a Cleric hero with upgrades that gives units a stat boost based on her knowledge and spellcraft, and a Knight hero with unlocks that weaken enemy mage heroes, dropping their spells a level and increasing their cost. I’ve also got a whole flock of griffons, including a subset of griffon that can counterattack endlessly, making them effective aerial tanks. How are you getting on with the combat, Julian?
Julian: At first I found it surprisingly shallow, especially for a series that’s got such a dedicated fanbase.
Battles take place on a grid that’s broken up into hexes and you can arrange your stacks of units across the tiles on the extreme left of the screen, while unseen the enemy does the same on the opposite side. You then take it in turns to walk your troops to approach and thwack each other with swords, spears, maces, and all other kinds of medieval miscellany until all the troops of one side are dead. There didn’t appear to be many choices I could make, direction of attack doesn’t impact damage for most attacks, and it’s hard to immediately tell if one of your units will be super effective against another. It made me miss the feature in earlier Heroes of Might & Magic games where you could just let friendly AI control your army for you. (Edwin’s note: That’s still there – it’s a small button in the bottom left of the battle screen.)
However, the more I’ve played, the more depth I’ve stumbled into. Turn order turns out to be hugely important, and you do have a little control over it. While a unit’s initiative determines when they take their move, you can tell them to wait on their turn, sending them to the back of the queue. Judicious use of the wait button has made some of my more effective turns, especially to manipulate enemy counter-attacks. For instance, my infiltrators have a high initiative that lets them go early in a turn, but they tear apart like wet paper under the lightest enemy attacks, so I’ll often tell them to wait and use my much tougher minotaurs to attack an enemy unit first, which triggers the defenders’ single counter-attack, leaving them unable to fight back when the infiltrators take their delayed turn and stab them in the back.
The turn order and slight buffs and debuffs to attacks – such as damage dropoff to ranged attacks over long distance or the bonus mounted units get for charging into an attack – make for many small ways you can orchestrate the best outcome in a battle. Though, I do wish the UI did a better job of communicating all of this. I only found out about some of these effects by digging into unit descriptions, and it’s hard to calculate how much of an impact leaning into buffs and debuffs has on your move.
I do need to keep remembering your hero is standing off in the sidelines and can call in magic attacks, spending the focus points you earn when your units deal and receive damage. Softening up a naiad with a magic missile before skewering them with a trogolodyte’s spear can be the difference between finishing off the water spirit or them surviving to counterattack your green-skinned, cave-born infantry. I just keep forgetting to use them.
Edwin: Yeah, I keep forgetting about my hero too. Seems a bit cheeky of them to loiter on the periphery, while all of their valiant troops get slaughtered! You wouldn’t catch a Total War general being so hands-off.
I do agree that the combat feels very shallow at first, with minimal need to do anything other than gallop forward and focus-fire when you have the numerical advantage, but as you say, organising your turns to effectively absorb enemy counterattacks takes some thought. I found it got a lot more interesting with the first round of hero or spell unlocks and unit upgrades. I had a siege battle where I was teleporting kamikaze cavalry through the walls to preoccupy some undead archers, while I smashed away at the gates with a catapult. When you’re up against another hero, the spellcasting element becomes something of a duel alongside the battle, which is fun.
I haven’t found the interface impenetrable, but I’m definitely having difficulty tracking which buffs and debuffs are in play. I think the city interface is also a little muddled, due to some confusing colour choices with on-screen buttons. I can never quite decipher which units I can hire, and which I don’t have the cash or facilities for.
I’ve barely spent any time in the story campaign, but I do like the feel of it. An optimal amount of dialogue during quests, posh character art and charismatic voice-acting during the cutscenes. As far as I can tell, the plot here is that there’s an evil red star and now all the realm’s fires are “eternal”, refusing to be extinguished. I’m leading a crack squad of minotaurs to the rescue. How are you finding that aspect?
Julian: I missed the campaign button when I first started playing and jumped straight into a scenario. It put me in the musty shoes of necromancer queen Feuneralla as she raised an army to fight off the humans coming to put her back in the ground. It was good hokey fun but, having not played an undead before, I’d no idea how to use her ‘Raising Undead’ skill. It’s likely something that comes up in the campaign, but a codex or slightly more revealing tooltips wouldn’t go amiss. With no city or obvious way to recruit troops, it was an hour of having her units whittled down in grinding battles, which wasn’t the best introduction.
Once I got into the campaign, though, things went much smoother. I think I’m a touch ahead of you in the campaign and I’m becoming a fast fan of Gunnar and his minotaur guard. I still can’t build a labyrinth in my city to recruit new ones, mind, so every time I lose one of the bull-headed fellas in battle it’s a terrible loss. I’ll say, be wary of battles with villagers. They may appear harmless, only moving one hex a turn and carrying a piglet under their arm, but they can be deceptive…
So, what do you say? Griffons out of 10? Potentially a touch harshly I’m going to say its six legendary creatures out of ten for me. I’m enjoying myself and starting to get a sense there is more under the surface than meets the eye, but I’m not yet sold on all the busywork of running back and forth across the map to collect piles of logs and recruit small gaggles of units.
Edwin: I give it seven griffons, which is easily enough to butcher a few upstart peasants, even peasants brandishing piglets. My main concern is that having to tend to my cities might drag more and more as I become more invested in my hero squads. Another argument for Olden Era is that there aren’t many directly comparable games, even though it’s been 10 years since the last proper HOMM – Songs of Conquest, I guess? Heroes of Might and Magic is very much its own style. I’d say Unfrozen are off to a good start with this comeback project.