Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era Steam Charts & Stats

This game does so much right. It's an amazing, faithful return to the heights of the franchise, but i cannot recommend this game until they fix the AI. The AI is either laughably easy, or cheating relentlessly. The easy AI are fine for filling spaces, but from hard onward, the AI seems to just manifest units between battles. It's made for some very frustrating matches with friends. If they can fix the AI, this review will be glowing.

I first played Heroes of Might and Magic 29 years ago. My impressions of the new version are very good. What I miss in the game is an option to not include all unit stacks in battle(s) without having to leave them in a city or outpust. It would be great, if players can place and remove markers on the mini map.

Game definitely has potential - a lot of units, mechanics to explore, but currently playing against AI is kind of waste of time - it's either braindead without giving any challenge, or just incredibly cheats. I don't want to play online, so at this point I just don't know what to do with this game

This is not a negative review. This is a "neutral" review, with the hopes that it attracts attention and helps the developers address key problems. I am a diehard HoMM III veteran with many hours played since the game was released, and then HoTA and ERA on top of that. I'll start with the neutral points: - stability and bugs. Yes, there are bugs everywhere. Do they make playing unpleasant? Not really. I would actually say there are not so many bugs as you would expect from the Early Access game. Mostly cosmetics and QoL stuff. - magic is unintuitive (schools do not classify as easily as elemental magic did) and uninspiring (about a third of spells are actually helpful, the rest are clear placeholders to dilute the spell pool or situational at very best). - balance is bad (clear winners, clear losers), but it's also not big deal for an Early Access game. Things will change for sure, no point complaining just now. The Good: - the spirit of Heroes is there, no doubt - core mechanics are alright as well - simultaneous turns in multiplayer are a very welcome addition; it's a bit unclear when they start being sequential though (you have to approach your player enemy, but the rule set is unclear) The Bad: - art, uhhhhh where do I start? The units are a bland mess - especially on native terrain, do not stand out in the battlefield, blend in to the background (and I played contrast, saturated presets, mind). In HoMM III you clearly identified Archmagi, Rocs, Crusaders, Angels the moment you saw them. In Olden Era, you are seeing blobs of desaturated colours and generic design with little identity. It's even worse once there's a close quarters battle and units are even less visible. Hexes are very pale too. Cursor does not identify easily in such situation and I missed a few attacks when I moved instead. King's Bounty is almost 20 years old and all units are clearly identifiable (even when they just swap palettes as in mods). As I almost never auto-combat, it's assaulting your eyes all the time. - City art is also messy: you will never identify where's your dungeon, schism marketplace. All buildings just become a part of background the moment you build them. Apparently this is why right side buttons were added. - Map reads poorly as well, especially as there are generic buildings (give X resources once a week) which resemble basic mines heavily. In HoMM III there is no way to mistake an ore mine with anything else. Here, the ore mine features mercury mine melting pots (yeah it makes sense from the realistic POV, but is not helpful in terms of gameplay) TL;DR the game is a work in progress, I will be monitoring it and happy to correct my review if I prove wrong eventually.

This is the new HOMM game that was promised. Gameplay wise it is similar to Heroes 3 with new spells, units, building features. It offers the game play you are looking for and doesnt take long to pick up: doesnt overcomplicate regular play, keeps everything nice and easy. Game still has some early access challenges with balance, I'd love to see more castles and the entire campaign but it is a fully functional product already: you will have fun.

There's a lot to like about this game, I'm happy it exists, and I have hope that I'll eventually be able to play it, but after multiple matches I can definitively say that the AI difficulty is broken which makes it unplayable... even after they've released multiple patches to try and fix' it. I'm constantly getting completely steamrolled by the AI in about ~20 turns on 'easy' and not in a way that feels like I'm being tactically out maneuvered in the battle, or where I can learn from my mistakes... the AI hero just has a larger, fully upgraded army, walks right up to me and destroy me. I'm not going to pretend to be great at HoMM games, but as someone who has played many of the HoMM games before I would hope that would have a chance against one 'easy' AI opponent.

Seeing sseth review reminded me I played this over a week ago. Game is obviously, absolutely incomplete, but what's there was good enough to keep me distracted for 40 hours Good enough for a hesitant 'yes'. Hesitant because this is still EA, but good framework for a game already This isn't Heroes 3, want Heroes 3? Go play that. Still good and has many mods in development But if you want and wonder what a new HoMM game could be instead of like, 6 or 7, this is the possible answer A lot done for being in Early Access already. The amount of mileage, time and value, and dopamine you can milk from it is limited on whether you want to subject yourself to competitive multiplayer currently. I don't have the time or desire for that. You can still squeeze enjoyment pretty easily, but that's where a lot of focus and development has gone into so far. Pretty great if you get at least a single friend willing to skirmish with I did appreciate all six factions being developed enough to where they all felt worth trying by the time the game was available for purchase. Except Hive. Being 98% melee is a nice and different experience compared to maxxing range stack abuse, but feels tough to balance. Hive is in a ditch right now inheriting the Inferno curse Balance patching is already coming down in waves. I can't be bothered to relearn what may be different before release, but devs are quick to try and jump on player feedback. They read a LOT of feedback and criticism Art style has a lot of criticism. I'm pretty neutral on it, but I started played after their EA release, where in the demo they apparently had several weird models people questioned until changes were made. So they're willing to bend to enough feedback, just not Ship of Theseus themselves. Which I think is alright The game looks GOOD in motion. Many unit idle animations, overworld structures, spell effects, town screens, range from either decent to good for me Music feels mild. Most town screen music did not leave an impression on me, not grating either though. The fight music was a bit more memorable They released a roadmap with their goals. It's an admittance of what's obviously not there yet, and what they think they can add in a reasonable amount of time. Something to refer to and hold them to their word. Will try again if 1.0 release hits

Please stop letting the unpaid intern write the dialogue/flavor text. This is Might and Magic, it should be taking itself seriously with the lore and world building. The gameplay is fine as of now, and judging by the patch notes I think that it is heading in a healthy direction. By the time the game is "done" I feel like the gameplay aspect should be in a good state. But please, for the love of all that is holy on Enroth, replace the writing team. This is borderline zoomer-tier writing. I can't believe I'm saying this but ChatGPT would've done a better job.

Being someone who grew up playying HOMM III and IV, I love this game. I got it out of pure nostalgia factor (and because I got recommended it by a fellow HOMM III) lover. Pros for me: - I love the new approach to the campaign mode - Love the factions and love that spells & magic now play a bigger role - Love the graphics being mix between old-school and a more modern take However, I feel like I am the part of Heroes franchise fans the devs don't exactly cater to. For me HOMM series' strongest place was always the campaigns and various map missions. I only ever played hotseat matches with my friends, and I don't care about online matches at all. For me HOMM has always been first and foremost a single-player game, same way as Crusader Kings or Civilisation series, and campaigns were its hallmark because they provided the lore, the unique challenges, and made the game engaging beyound just 'beat your opponent'. Seeing that there will be only one campaign mission in the whole game and the road map and patch being aimed mostly at balancing the game for pvp and online play makes me disapponted. I am not sure I would've bougth the game, had I known that what I love about the series will be treated as an afterthough\a bonus to the multiplayer mode. ETA: I recommend this game if you are in for a multiplayer, but if you prefer single-player spiced with an occasional match with a friend, this game might be headed into a different direction. If something changes, I'll amend the review.

It's probably a nice competitive game, but the AI ruins the single player for me (and a few others it seems). You can probalby read what is nice about the game in other reivews. This is all on HARD difficulty, as normal is way too easy if you have played any of the heroes games in your life. Why I don't recommend the game for playing against the computer. As others mentioned, the AI will be at your door with a ridicolus army. After 3 weeks, he is usually at your door with 10-20 Tier 7 units and 200-300 tier 1 units. The rest of the army is similar in size. He somehow manages to capture all towns on his way to me, while I didnt even explore all of my starting area. There is no way to win the fight, except if he sieges your town. The turrets are ridicolusly strong at the moment. With all turrets combined, you can shoot (depending on the enemy faction) around 7-10 of his tier 7 units. You can also have some obstacles with 1hp on the battlefield if you select the proper wall upgrades, which the enemy prioritizes to hit. I've seen it several times that he sends in a dragon, and he can position it next to a ranged unit and these obstacles and ... he will just shoot the barrier ... And then, he will lose his hero, becasue they wont flee or surrender. Ever. If you have killed their starter hero, the enemy wont really put up a fight anymore, as he lost all the artifacts/xp that hero gathered. If you have more than one enemies, it will be even worse, because they will all try to attack you. Thats priority no1. If there is another CPU player in the way, they will attack and kill each other, but they wont explore all their areas, they will be on their way to kill you. With these massive starter armies. If you camp in your town and let them attack you one after the other, eventually they all lose their items superior armies. I managed to win a bigger game with 7 CPUs. The first months, I couldnt leave the town, because some random hero just took it. At some point my hero became ridicolusly strong, and a few weeks later the AI ran out of heroes to buy. This is not fun. The endgame was basically to collect all the towns on the map and yay, I won. No enemy heores, no movement on the map, nothing. I still have to try it, but maybe you can accelerate this state by buying all the heroes you can, and then just dismissing them. The MP part is okay I guess, with interesting modes to duel each other. To me Heroes of Might and Magic was never an online multiplayer game. I played solo or sometimes the hot seat mode with friends. But even there, it was more about killing the CPU and exploring the map, collecting the bigger army than your friends. There are also some bugs, like schools of magic completely blocked for a fight. I thought it must be an item, but there was none in play that prevented the use of an entire school of magic. Ive also read other comments complaining about this, so I suppose its a bug. I cannot recommend this game for the singleplayer experience at the moment.