Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era (2026)
Olden Era, like the name suggests, intends to evoke the nostalgia-laden Heroes of Might and Magic games. HOMM2 and HOMM3 are particular vectors of nostalgia among strategy gamers of a certain age and rightfully so. They are quite fun and, to my understanding, HOMM3 is an especially robust strategy game. It is still played competitively and, at the arbitrary time I am writing this, there’s a 700+ viewer tournament streaming on Twitch. A HOMM3 remake was also just announced, perhaps gratuitous given the original still looks and plays fine on modern machines, but “gratuitous remake” seems to be the inevitable fate of any game of any notoriety.
But Olden Era! Also good! The HOMM games are not famous for being the first of their genre nor the most innovative, but boy did they nail their design. They achieve that entrancing “one more turn” design by selecting a few solid core ideas and spooling those out into a larger game. One barely needs a tutorial: playing the game teaches you how to play it.
There is a macro component to the game: exploring the map, collecting resources, building up your towns, and generating units. This is, essentially, about optimizing the movement your hero is allotted per turn. You will make many small mistakes, learn many small lessons, and iterate. Traveling on roads is faster than not, some resources are more important than others, certain resources refresh per week so you might develop resource-gathering circuits. Unlocking a second or third hero can feel overwhelming and counterproductive (splitting your units creates two weak armies that are easily picked off). Until you realize you can use your extra heroes to do the grunt work of collecting supplies and transporting units while your combat-focused hero goes on the offensive. Every new hero is that much more movement you can “spend” on the map.
The micro component, the combat, occurs on a turn-based hex map. The core idea here is “hitting first is good.” Units counterattack when hit, but an attacker who hits first reduces the enemy unit count, which reduces the power of their counterattack. And so you learn to keep your units just out of range. But then units with ranged attacks enter the mix, forcing you to approach. And then your heroes learn magic spells, including offensive spells and defensive buffs, prompting further strategic considerations. And some units counterattack before getting hit, or have long reach which prevents counterattacks, and so on and so on.
A tutorial is nice but you don’t need to learn any of this in advance: everything makes sense, everything leads to a satisfying “ooooohhhh I seeeee very interesting” lesson even if the lesson is sometimes painful. The HOMM games, Olden Era included, do a tremendous job of adding little grooves and wrinkles, eventually revealing a deep, textured strategy game. These games exist on the opposite end of the spectrum of, say, your Crusader Kings-em-ups, equally fascinating but defined by esoteric systems that feel like black boxes for all but the most invested players.
If Olden Era makes any mistake, I think it dips its toes into the esoteric end of the pool a little too much. I have not played a HOMM since 3 so perhaps this is old hat for enjoyers of HOMMs 4-7, but Olden Era adds a variety of sub-systems that require a little tutorializing. HOMM3 had, for example, the macro and micro components described above, hero progression and inventory systems, spellcasting systems, world maps with aboveground and underground portions, and more–it was no simple game. Olden Era has all that and more, some of which is difficult to understand without the tutorial: heroes can rank up into different prestige classes, cities generate “law points” to be spent on a subsystem of civic-themed buffs, heroes generate “focus points” during combat which can then be spent by both heroes and units in different ways, etc.
It’s all a bit crufty. Strategy games do require some number of decision points to achieve their desired complexity, and in game design it is extremely difficult to achieve that sweet spot of elegance and depth. And, to be clear, I am having a lot of fun with Olden Era–it does not compromise the fundamental appeal of the HOMM formula. (It also has a nice high-fantasy presentation befitting the art of 2 and 3, where I think HOMMs 4-7 look pretty ugly.) One can hardly criticize a game for not achieving the same design alchemy as its most beloved predecessor. But still, if I am being honest, playing Olden Era kinda makes me want to fire up HOMM3 instead.