Heroes of Might & Magic is having a moment. Not only are publishers Hooded Horse and Ubisoft backing the development of Unfrozen’s Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, the first new game in the series in more than a decade, but Ubisoft have revealed they’re completely remaking the series’ best-regarded entry: Heroes of Might & Magic 3.
While there are many quality of life improvements in the remake, Ubisoft aims to keep its spirit as close to the original as possible. There is a new three-mission prelude to get you into the story and teach you the game’s systems but, after that, you’re into the thick of the original campaign and its two expansions – Armageddon’s Blade and The Shadow of Death. This also means you’ll have all nine factions to play with.
I’ve played the remake for a few hours already and I’ll get into my thoughts on that in a moment. But, the most telling thing about the remake is that it supports all the custom maps and campaigns players have made for the past 25 years. Ubisoft showed how you can import any original map file into Might & Magic 3 Remake’s map creator and it will build a modern-looking level from the old data. It’s a wonderful way to support the Heroes of Might & Magic 3 players who are still playing decades on from its release.
I made a note while playing that Heroes of Might & Magic 3 had a pastoral glow, like the kind you would see in a Turner painting. In hindsight, that’s not the case. Turner’s work is a little too close to impressionism for that – he creates the look of a thing without giving it textural definition –, so really you’re better-minded to look at the paintings of Asher Brown Durand. Get close to his paintings and you can almost see the individual leaves on the too-perfect trees in his bucolic scenes. I realise I sound like I have travelled all the way up my own arse, but what I hope it gets across is that this is a remake that knows the tone of the original games. Heroes of Might & Magic 3 is a world of high fantasy, populated with pristine heroes and unrepentant villains, and that is evident in every screen.
The Heroes of Might & Magic games are an unusual blend of turn-based strategy and RPG. Looking a little like a board game, each turn you move hero generals and their accompanying retinues around the world, interacting with the characters, buildings, and objects that litter a map. Undead wraiths guard gateways to the underworld, goblins set up shop outside mine shafts, and wood nymphs block the only path through ancient forests. Except for enemy generals, characters stay put waiting for you to come to them. So combat is often on your terms. Hover over a stack of enemy units and your scouts will tell you if you face a hard or trivial battle, and you can choose how to act on that information. Success grants you XP and whenever your general levels up they can pick a passive upgrade that improves one of their stats. Increasing their movement distance on land or increasing their view distance, for example.
Your explorations on the map are all in aid of gathering the resources needed to build and upgrade the structures in your keeps. You start most missions with one stronghold and you can capture others – if you can break through their walls and overcome the forces defending them. Unlike other strategy games where you can hire as many troops as you can afford, in the Heroes of Might & Magic strongholds only spawn a set number of units every seven turns. This means that, if your army suffers major losses in a battle, replenishing your forces can take a long time. Especially as you will need to move your general between strongholds to actually recruit the replacement troops.
In Heroes of Might & Magic 3 Remake, all of these systems are unchanged. The differences from the original, besides the game’s full 3D and painterly look, come in its quality of life changes. You can now set a build queue for your keeps – in the past, it was all too easy to forget to set them to work on something, leading to a wasted turn. It’s now also easier to recruit new units en masse, rather than needing to hop into individual unit buildings. A purely aesthetic upgrade, but a nice one nonetheless, is that you now have a brief video of your heroes arriving into town, which nicely ties the overworld map to your city management screens.
The best of these tweaks, though, is that in the Heroes’ turn-based battles, you can now see the movement and firing range of yours and enemy units by holding the ALT key. Before, making sure you were advancing your troops but keeping them out of attack range from the enemy was a fiddly pain, and I found myself using this new tool constantly. While it doesn’t change the tactical options in battle from what was originally available, it makes it much easier to engage with those decisions.
Caption
Attribution
Now, I’m going to have to pick my words carefully here. I am not a fan of the Heroes of Might & Magic series. I find its maps to be static and I don’t enjoy that its standing armies, capturable buildings, and collectible items simply wait for you to come along and engage with them. I also don’t much like its turn-based combat. In part because discerning what kind of unit will be good against another isn’t immediately obvious, and comes from learning what counters what by rote. Too many times I have sent a fat stack of infantry against a small stack of golem and watch my swordsmen get absolutely whomped. There are many games where I’ve swept around the map defeating NPC enemies, collecting up cool items, and building an army that made me feel invincible, only to see it wiped out in a single battle without a clear indication as to why I was so much weaker. The cost of a defeat like that can also be the end of a mission, as rebuilding an army is time-consuming, and made all the harder when an AI general is now roving about your land taking all your stuff.
So, that said, I can confidently say I had a bad time with Heroes of Might & Magic 3 Remake in exactly the way I did with the original game 25 years ago. And, by that logic, I would assume that if you liked the original game, there is a good chance that this will tick all of your boxes. I think this may be as good a remake I’ve seen of a game I don’t like, one that respects the players of that game (even if I disagree with those players about what a good time looks like), and I’m really glad to see Ubisoft making it. Genuinely.
While I don’t want every game to be a remake, with Heroes of Might & Magic 3 and Rayman Legends, Ubisoft look to be on a particularly high quality nostalgia trip. Assassin’s Creed 4 Resynced is more debatable. (Though other opinions are available.) And, better still, is that if you’re looking for something that progressing the series, Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era is doing just that. Even I had a pretty good time with it.
