Songs of Conquest

Had fun for a few hours until the game devolved into enemies being spawned in my backyard without giving me room to react. If your favorite part of playing say, a MOBA, is getting backdoored then this might compell you. Otherwise, just annoying.

It's a pretty nice game. But who is this genius who decided to switch the mouse's control buttons? "Old school" graphics are a good trick, but it would be nice to make just a little better quality for 4K monitors. Even HMM3 looks much better.
Overall, I recommend this game.

Stunning game. I wish the campaign had more broken up missions to really help set and tell the story warcraft 3 style but it's a gem nonetheless

As someone who's played HOMM2 & 3 (and yes, even 4), and would rather perform a full frontal lobotomy on myself than play whatever the hell Ubisoft eventually made out of the franchise, this ... sort of scratches the itch. The campaigns are fun, but more puzzle-ish than tactical, particularly the ones where you can't lose your primary hero. I find the magic system needlessly overburdened with complexity, to the point where I don't bother building a hero up to take advantage of spells.

I find that the battles are not nearly as much fun. I don't know if I'm just not playing it correctly, or my brain has atrophied to the point where only HOMM 3 style combat makes logical sense, but I find that most battles I just do a quick resolution, rather than playing it out. I *should* want to play out the battles, it *should* be one of the more fun aspects of the game, but I just find them generally unfun, unintuitive (particularly the magic) and often unfair. I've tried a few combats where the auto-combat will crush an opponent with minimal losses, while I will barely make a dent in them (insert gif of Homer reading the "Am I retarded?" book here). Why can't all units elect to wait? Why do I have to use WASD to move around my view of the map? Mouselook worked fine back in the goddamn 90s, and that was (checks watch) 30 years ago.
WHY CAN'T I MOVE MY UNITS FORWARD WHEN I AM DEFENDING A TOWN??

Maybe in scenario or free play some of my issues would resolve, I haven't finished the campaign yet and I've enjoyed the story (well, except for the Necro) enough to continue through those. I'd say if you want a break from HOMM3, give it a go.

Solid strategy game that is a successor to might and magic (never played might and magic but this is what others tell me). World building is solid and the story is surprisingly well done. I 10/10 recommend if you liked might and magic and/or like total war games. Even RTS fans might enjoy some aspects of this

The ui is horrible, to look at the creature's stats you need to do 1 thing, to look at effects - another, to see how much will the damage increase when attacking the enemy you have to wait like 2 seconds each time. Same goes for the towns, you cant simply go in the town and buy units for your hero, for the defence and just leave the town, no, you have to use the hero if you want to buy units for the hero, but you will not be able to buy the units for your town if you use your hero, you have to click on the town, chose " defence " and only then you are able to buy units for the town. You cant simply look at the loot you got from pillaging a pile of things, you have to wait for the each and every single one of the resources you got to appear and disappear separately. You cant look at what the structure does if you own it, it just says that it is owned by you, you have to click on it to see the effects it gives to you. The ui is TERRIBLE and this kind of crap that eats time like crazy is everywhere.
The songs after the missions are cringe, units use the same abilities most of the time ( i mean that you can see the same ability on the different units, like they couldnt make a new ones ), and magic is overpowered.
At first - its confusing to play this game, but after some time it becomes painful to play it.
Also the Arleon faction is a weird inconsistant mush made of elfs, european-like people, weird forest spirits and useless knights.

There is basically no game in it. It is just running around collecting everything literally (there is way to much to collect that at some point it makes it just annoying). Wants to be HOMM3 but lacks all the flair and essence that makes HOMM3 still the best of these kind of games. It is like with 4x where there are so many trying to be Master of Orion 2 but still there is no game out that is as good as MoO2 - except for Stellaris (with missing tactical turn based battles of MoO2)

The gorgeous art style, magical soundtrack, and deep gameplay brought me right back to 2007, when I played Heroes of Might and Magic: Tribes of the East.

Sure, the pixelated graphics differ from modern HoMMs, but the vibe feels similarly nostalgic to me.

I love this game and will definitely buy the DLCs. The team really nailed it—thank you!

What an excellent game! This is a huge gift for all nostalgic heroes of might and magic fans!

A game works perfectly fine on mac book m1 pro and you are able to play online with windows users without any issues.

Great work! Keep it up

Best turned based strategy experience of the past 10 years. I can't remember the last time I've had this much fun with a turn based game. In depth combat mechanics with interesting synergies, cool magic system and you also get economy and town building. The cut scenes, dialogues and small details scattered across the game-world really add up to a great story. I'll only give it 9/10 because I think the game is missing out on adding city landscapes like in the old Heroes games, which added great progression and satisfaction when you don't only see the city in the map overview. Great work!

Fantastic game..... So easy to learn & once you get accustomed to everything.... You will be up into the wee hours of the night developing your strategies.

An okay HOMM-like but with some frustrating design changes that put me off:
- When levelling up your hero, one of the skills that's always available is the ability to have more troops in your army, since this is always good, I just found myself taking it every level and ignoring all the other skills which was a bit disappointing.
- The city management aspect is frustrating. I really like it in HOMM but in Songs of Conquest, you have to build the buildings on the map and the build sites can be scatted all over the place, Finding your buildings and build sites can be annoying. This felt tedious instead of fun.
- A lot of tactical depth is missing: The placement of troops at the start of battle has less effect, and it's hard to control which angle your troops will attack from.
- The factions are far less interesting, they are quite bland. Most of them feel like they should be split into two separate factions and given a lot more interesting differences.

The game is quiet fun but the developer need to take a look on game balancing again.
Also the random select skills system in this game is really stupid when there is only a way to win the game is casting spells
- Why do I have to select other skills when my character need to cast powerful order spell to protect her troops from the AI's nuke spells?
- Why do my character need melee damage when she is Doctor Naja?
- When I try deadly and overwhelmed AI, the issues of that stupid system come more clearly, I swear I have prayed it to give me the skill of spell damage reduction but no, I never see it then when I battle with the AI, it nuked my troops although I can win but I lost the game. I have no time enough to recruit my troops to go further - the gold also does no allow me to do that.
I would like to open the skill tree of my characters to select and develop their skills instead of choose one of the three stupid suggestions.

It's a pretty good turn-based tactics game. I like how they introduced some novel mechanics rather than just completely copying other popular games in the genre such as Heroes of Might & Magic. The mana generation system is pretty interesting. Definitely worth trying out if you're a fan of the genre!

Beautiful and plays wonderfully. Each faction is varied enough to allow for a descent number of viable army builds each. The game is not perfect but the core foundation is so solid it is a game i cant wait to watch grow. Love it

A brilliant take on the classic heroes gameplay with a pixel art flavour.

It's BEAUTIFUL, combat is satisfying, potentially an incredible HOMM successor, BUT - currently it lacks content SEVERELY

4 factions in a game like this make it feel like a demo. Almost all matches will have duplicates of the same faction, and the balance issues are very noticeable because of the lack of variety, which discourages you from choosing some factions because they're much weaker, leaving you with very few choices

I hope they improve the game's balance and add the missing content (and not only in paid DLC form)

In it's current state (Oct. 2024) I can only recommend you get it on sale

Interesting take on RTS genre. Including a map creation tool and having a content road map are big pluses for longevity.

Recommend because I got this on sale and got some good hours out of it. Overall I will say the game is slightly above recommend. It just seems to get tedious as winning doesn't seem so much like a choice in tactics. Beat all the campaigns, the fourth was the worst imo. Struggled to want to finish, but I like to say I completed a game before I uninstall. I like the art style, the music, and the combat was fun at first, but just feels off. Overall I would say check it out if you get it for less than $10 like I did.

Strategy game that does not require you to think. At this point, halfway through the Campaign mode content on hard difficulty, I can say that although graphically and musically stunning, this is a boring game.

* I don't expect there to be a crazy story in Campaign mode or anything, but reading the same conversation ("they're/you're on my land, perish" "no YOU'RE on MY land/im just a peasant/you'll regret this") on loop is grating. This is a minor gripe.

* The major gripe, compounded by the next two points, is that this game does not really encourage players to act strategically and rewards playing it safe. Battles are decided by strength of force and number of units much more than they are clever play or countering some types of units with other types, as units have mirroring counterparts in their other factions that rarely have a unique gimmick that makes them stand out (like burrowers, which even then only get that unique ability as an upgraded unit). Quick battle AI is preferable to fighting manually most of the time, as it is not disincentivised and will usually do a good job, especially if your units are more than the enemy force (which reinforces piling all your army on one hero and steamrolling by winning battles in one click). If it were more possible to fight enemies with less units and win by choosing strategic units, spells, heroes and items I would be having so so much more fun. At time of review, you just beef up one guy and quick battle while suffering no losses until you win. The game wants you to have the challenge of lockpicking the door but forgot to give it hinges so you can rip it out of the wall.

* Units are very similar to each other. This is probably a good deal because you are limited to your faction's troops, but i would argue that individual units are simply too similar to the others, like i mentioned in the point above. I feel like units would benefit from having a unique ability that's not just "+ a little bit of some stat" and for those abilities to be available BEFORE levelling up the unit, so that the base unit isnt so bland. OR maybe we just need more units. To be fair there is very little variety in that circle also.

* The magic system is praiseworthy in that I enjoy that what mana you get to cast certain spells is dependent on your units and can be boosted by splitting unit stacks in half (making them weaker but giving you more mana in battle). The spells available for you to cast, however, are not very distinct, and their reliability varies vastly between heroes, as some heroes do not get the ability upgrade their magic nearly as much as others. Overall the magic is the part of the game I enjoyed the most aside from the game's artistic merits, but it's being hampered by the other battle mechanics.

* Items and levels are also boring. How many times have folks spoken about flat stat increases, I mean come on.

Without major balancing, I'm honestly just going to go back to playing HoMM and 4x games. This game may be trying to be it's own thing but it is failing and it comes off as a bad copy of HoMM3.

This is not HOMM clone!

I have put some hours in this game and i'm really dissapointed. On the begining i was just thinking that game is not fun because i don't mechanics. But after i palying one of campaigns and singlplayer map with bots. I can sum my expirience as boring.

Cons:
- No strategy in battle, in old HOMM games even if had weaker army you could win battles if played smart. Here only thing which matter is army. Most of units can travers battelfield in two turns. Ranged units are weak. Magic is not working without units.
- Grinding, to win you need to collect full army(game limits unit size and like in HOMM lnumber of units in army). Without very stron army it's really difficult to win a battle with neutral armies without losses.
- Neutral armies are not made with sinlgle unit, because of this every battle is strugle. Because of this fighting with players/towns is not unique anymore.
- Small number of different units, and small variety of units
- Small number of fractions
- Boring artifacts

Pros:
- Graphic style
- Music

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
A good attempt at the Heroes III formula, but an attempt nonetheless.

The campaign is an interesting shared story from the perspective of the different factions, but it is presented in non chronological order, which makes it difficult to follow. Sadly, it never teaches players anything about the game mechanics. Castle management has been streamlined, but the stats of the units seem to have no meaning, making combat frustrating. There is a lot of content to enjoy here, and it is a fresh take on the formula, but it is still not as enjoyable as Heroes III. Worth at a discount.

Cool game overall, I recommend it for fans of turn-based strategy. Definitely has that Heroes feel to it.

Unfortunately, I got filtered. I was playing the first campaign, when suddenly the game threw at me 4 back-to-back fights against enemies with units that take barely any damage and 2-shot my units. I guess this would be fine for like, the final level or something, but I got it in the 3rd or 4th mission. I'm not that great at strategy games for sure, but it feels impossible to beat this level without doing actual research and minmaxing everything, and I'm only on normal (fair) difficulty.

tldr game's fun but very hard, so hard I stopped having fun

thr first war sim ive ever played and im okay at it, after the first campaign i start to have problems because im an asylum escapee.

i start to overthink the buildings, i often find myself getting stuck on which building to pick because im just not good at making these choices. can anybody help?

A very nice strategy game that reminds me of Heroes III, a game I was hopelessly addicted to. Offers a good challenge and a good depth of strategy. Writing for the Arleon and Rana campaign isn't great, but the Loth and Barya storyline are good. Even better now with the mixed factions !

A must buy if you loved the Heroes of Might and Magic games, an amazing storyline, fun gameplay, beautiful art and music. The Devs are very active with their community which is great.

The 4 campaigns are kind of short, but it's better to look at them as introductions for the factions, providing you the knowledge to use the factions abilities and units effectively as well as providing lore and background for them

Devs completely destroyed any semblance of game balance. It's so bad to the point where even the first campaign is unnecessarily punishing on the default difficulty (Fair). For example, in the third mission, "vassals and villains," by turn 35 two enemy wielders spawn with much larger armies, with tier 2 troops which you have absolutely no chance of holding off with how little time you've had to actually build and accumulate your forces. I don't remember the pve being this imbalanced in early access but now that I'm coming back to it, it's just not fun.

The game suffer great issues and has so many flaws.
- when playing the campaign, you need to build your character the way the dev intended or it will be difficult or impossible to progress, an the only options is to restart the campaign.
- False impression of open maps where we would have the choice, if you don't rush, impossible to win the mission as you are too weak. And you turn right instead of left, you loose precious turns, basically you have lost already, but you will know it 2 hours later.
- The game doesn't tell you that you are too behind, so even if you manage to kill an enemy with great loss after a few reload, in fact you had already lost in that reload and the next enemi will crush you. Basically never reload, restart and rush.
- You can have multiple wielders, but only your main is important, you cannot have the resources to build 2 armies, the 2nd wielder is basically just a troop transporter.

This is a weird one.

A very good homm type of game and there isn't much of these, but it has some glaring issue that limits replayability a lot.

First off, units are boring, like omg, I don't care about these units, every units from every factions just feel like different combination of health and dps, instead of having different abilities. Where the telepoting demons that summons other demon, the horse that inflict fear, the gargoyles that stuns etc. Units here are insanely boring.

Second, way worse issue, Ai is braindead. This is another game where difficulty just scales based on how much the Ai cheats. However, it needs to cheat, because its so goddamn dumb, to a point where once you played some game, at least for me, I didn't feel like playing again, because I know I can make the Ai essentially play however I want it to play. It is so predictable and abnormal.

Weirdly, instead of fixing these issue, the devs just add more stuff, more campaign and more factions, which I don't care about, because every game I've ever played, regardless of the factions I was playing as, or against, played the exact same, because of the issues described above.

In this current state, I recommend this game, but only at a high discount, I'd say at least 60% off, but if they fix these issue, it could be a game worth playing even at full price.

The old feeling of classic Might and Magic with a fun little world and enjoyable art. 1.0 is a great product for its price point and future DLC with their factions and roadmap are very promising.

I've never played HoMM or any strategy game like this before. Songs of Conquest is a completely new genre and I wasn't sure what I would get out of this. The overworld map is beautiful with its pixel art style. You find resources and build up your claimed settlements with them. The battle grid system is easy enough to control and the campaign gently introduces combat with some basic beginners battles. However as time goes on you see how the game has a lot of complexity hidden beneath the surface of its battles. It takes some time to understand how the stacks and your wielders essence magic work, but when things start to click things really pop off.

I enjoyed the campaign of Songs of Conquest so far. Im not a strategy game player 4X stuff like CIV bores me. This isn't boring, the battles are fun to do and the world map is interesting to explore. The complexity hiding beneath with the essence magic stuff makes it fun to find new ways to use spells. I like that the devs seem to be engaged with the community like with the community poll for DLC price. Thats cool, and makes me feel like my dollars went going towards good devs.

A beautiful HoMM-like with some of it's own changes to the formula?

Yes please.

Familiar enough to understand what makes these games work, different enough to justify not just playing HoMM again. Perfect.

If you're a fan of the old HoMM games, this will be a treat.

Remarkable, nostalgic and yet original tribute to legendary heroes of might and magic 3 game

Really scratches that HoMM3 itch with some different factions, campaigns, UI, etc.

Great for hot seat co-op while doing other things like chores or painting

It's good. like might & magic and other games.
But you should buy it is because your character jingles whenever they walk.
Like a sleigh with bells.
It's the small things.

could use 2 more factions, but a fantastic game with a ton of re-playability already

Doesn't look too good, metagame is not too deep. Unless it's 50% off and you are a big fan of HOMM-like games, I think it's not worth getting.

Still working my way through all of the first campaign but I am loving it. Cannot wait to see how this games progresses and what expansions come out.

It's basically Heroes III with gamepad support, morn ease of life tweaks and beautiful shiny art paying beautiful homage to the series, what else would you want ?

Simply put, the gameplay initially seems interesting.
The problem however is mainly with the UI.
Normally I would never rate down a game purely on the UI but here it is extremely bad.
The main issue with the UI is that you have absolutely no clue what is strong vs what.
Sometimes I oneshot an entire group of units, sometimes I can't even kill an individual unit.
Nothing properly indicates WHY this happens, only that it will or will not happen.
You can't see what their total health is, how much damage they deal, what kind of unit it is (ranged, melee, support).
This goes for both your own stats as the opponents.
The "danger" rating doesn't mean anything either, I've curbstomped 'challenging' opponents while getting absolutely ground into the dust myself by merely 'risky' even though 'challenging' is supposed to be harder and has way more units.

If you play this game, find a wiki and follow a couple dozen guides before trying so you don't get as frustrated as me.
The game unfortunately fails on a fun experience for me.

Actually, I'd want to put a mixed review, but Steam doesn't allow for it. Since I think that it's globally good, it is a "yes".

As good points, the game is really fun, capturing the essence of the HoMM series, with city building, choices between tech paths, strategic depth, a lot of magic spells with a cool mechanism...

Bad point: gosh this game is ugly. The colors are extremely dark, it's hard to distinguish things on the map, and this associated with the pixel art makes it a painful experience. I would have preferred a colorful experience like in HoMM 4 or 5. The UX is not good either, it's often not clear how to do something, the spells icons are hard to read, etc. With the right graphical overhaul, the game would be perfect.

i like it a lot but not yet balanced which is anoying on higher dificulties. ill wait for some updates before playing it again

Great game. Feels like a mini HoMM3. Interesting mechanics, story is decent, pixel art is great.

I can't recommend this game enough, although for you die-hard boys that thing you can play everything on hard, you'll have to tone it down at first. This game randomly wants to r*pe you like a brutal SC2 campaign.

I really wanted to enjoy this game but ultimatly what i realized was that the reason why i wanted that, was because of the pixel art (which is great).

In terms of gameplay it falls behind Heroes of might and magic 3. The changes introduced to the formula don´t bring any joy to the gameplay and uterlly was a failed experiment in that regard.

Played a couple of sessions, potential is definitely there but needs more content. I also didn't liked any nation that much to be honest, hopefully they will rebalance it and make them more distinct and unique in the future.

When I first saw Songs of Conquest I thought that this game similar to HoMM. But I was wrong and it's not a bad thing since the game is very fun and exciting anyway.

Gameplay-wise SoC is more similar to King's Bounty with a few ideas that remind me of Warlords series. Art and music are superb and it's obvious from the trailer. Magic system is interesting and I like it more than one from HoMM since it encourages you to experiment with different unit combinations. Town building part feels too simple and a little bit tedious at the beginning but I've got used to it very soon. The only thing I really lack is more units since the roster is not very big at the moment.

PS: thanks for the high quality Ukrainian localization. I enjoyed it a lot.

Wanted this to be the successor to HOMM2 and HOMM3. It's not. Maybe it wasn't setting out to be. Though I don't think this game gets the power fantasy element that these games are supposed to provide. It's supposed to be fun to wipe the floor against other heroes. But when your entire army can be wiped out by a hero 10 levels lower than you, destroying entire stacks with a single spell, then the game is no longer fun, and has fallen in to tedium. Normal difficulty should not be a slog to min-max army composition.

Devs: Realize that for the player, we must invest dozens of turns (and real time) to generate an army capable of combat, then realize that it's no fun to then see that army ripped to shreds in seconds. "Git gud" is not the answer to this. Balance is.

Not fussed if the game is better or more balanced in Multiplayer; that's not why I play these games.

Presentation and music are great. Atmosphere is top-notch. Balance (both spells and AI) need a lot of work.

The game art is very nice, but the balance is sometimes broken. I had a fight with a chaos hero in the third mission on the difficulty after normal. The hero casted poison with chain lightning and killed 2/3 of all my troops (I had 9 slots filled full). I was +4 levels to that hero, yet I was instakilled. Nonsense.
Upd: yeah, I had to learn all the game mechanics the hard way to succeed. The second chapter about frogs went much smoother. This game is addictive.

Pixel graphics are probably the worst part of this game, but if you are able to look beyond the graphics this little gem pack quite the punch. At first glance this looks like a basic clone of HoM&M, but the game mechanics are deeper than they looks with a very well balanced economy, troop features and an interesting magic system that depends on troop activity and difference types of magic essence. Campaigns are quite enjoyable and the game can present a challenge. Oh, almost forgot, race diversity in the game is done well with an actual diversity that will affect your battle strategy.
One Grumpy Russian score 8/10 – I find it hard to be grumpy at this game and I only wish it had normal graphics!

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