My empire in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Remake collapses with the grace of a dizzy donkey. Like many of history's greatest civilizations, the cause of its downfall is a tale as old as time: a necromancer with five ghost dragons.
In my defence, this is my first time stepping into Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (your honor, I was two when it launched in 1999). My interest in its remake lies less in its authenticity, then, and more in how it stacks up against my usual rotation of strategy games. Think Total War: Warhammer 3, XCOM, and any other turn-based malarky I can get my hands on.
The good news is that Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Remake slips into that pantheon like an overqualified god. Just a few hours with the game, including a brief story-driven prologue and a sandbox-style match on reimagined map Arrogance 2026, is enough to convince me that my two-year-old self should have been on this from day one.
A hero's welcome
Your time in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Remake is divided between exploring an overworld map (each 'turn' is a day), and fighting rival heroes and their armies in turn-based hexagonal combat. Cities can be conquered, securing their resources and allowing you to recruit from their denizen pool – a fiery hovel below-ground makes for an excellent source of demons, for example, while a tower high in the mountains can be repurposed to churn out powerful golems.
Building an army takes time. Recruitment buildings in your cities determine which fighters (and how many) are drawn to your banner each week. It's a neat feature for both balance and immersion, as it means you can't snap your fingers to replenish troops after a close battle. When rival hero Thorgrim lands an army on my shores, I march my biggest blob of pikemen, archers, and griffins to stop him. The battle is a slugfest, and although I win, my surviving forces are left tattered and I suspect I should have waited for a bigger advantage before picking a fight.
My only experience with HoMM is dabbling in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era for an hour, but the series' systems are very straightforward to pick up.
Attack and movement indicators make positioning easy to understand, and my tactics boil down to bogging melee foes down with pikemen while my archers and fast-flying Archangels cut down their backlines. Multiple units can be stacked into one, which is reflected in their health and damage – one hex can hold hundreds of pikemen that attack as one cohesive force, but with low individual health, an attack from, say, a ghost dragon can kill tens in one swoop.
Similarly, bigger units (say, a ghost dragon) are much hardier, requiring focused fire to take down. When I finally have enough troops to march on Thorgrim's tower across the sea, killing just one of his massive Titans requires using my hero to sling lightning while siege engines and archers pelt the construct with arrows.
It's smooth sailing right up until I uncover a gateway leading underground – revealing another layer of the map to fight over. Not that there's much fighting left to be done.
I recruit a necromancer hero and send her to the depths, in hopes of finding weaker units to kill and raise, only to be accosted by a far stronger necromancer with five (five!) ghost dragons. My own hero melts like fat off bone, and with the rest of my forces away fighting Thorgrim – and all recruitment pools bare from having bolstered them – my cities are defenseless.
My preview ends just as the gateway spills its undead guts onto the surface. The writing's on the wall – in a few more days, there would be nothing but ash and spectral scales and where my civilization once stood.
Coming into HoMM 3 Remake blind, I'm hooked on its high-fantasy flavor and no-frills strategy. But some changes are designed for long-time fans. The technology behind HoMM 3 Remake is capable of replicating existing and community-made maps from the 1999 original, switching their 20th-century graininess for lush modernity without losing each tile's functionality; alongside quality of life tweaks like attack previews.
It's a welcome surprise to see HoMM 3 given a new lease of life so soon after the runaway success of Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era. With the series' core proving remarkably timeless, HoMM 3 seems likely to bring even more new fans into the fold – myself included.
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