Just to prove my age, I am finally writing about a video game. The game in question might actually prove it even more considering that it belongs to a time before most of the industry’s current audience were conceived.

Heroes of Might and Magic III (or Heroes III, as people in a hurry call it) is a rare gem of gaming as far as I am concerned and holds a special place in my heart due to it being one of the first video games I remember playing. Well I say play, at first, I mostly watched my brother play it while I sat on his bedroom floor only wishing that I could be cool enough to be involved. Eventually I did get involved and involved others, including my girlfriend, and have been playing it on and off ever since. The game is part of a very long series, the other entries I am embarrassed to admit that I have not touched, which had its latest installment, Heroes of Might and Magic VII, released in 2015 to a very lukewarm and underwhelming reception. Looking at the comments for various online reviews, everyone seems to hark back to Heroes III as being the peak of this series’ achievement, calling it a huge part of their own childhoods as well. So, let us see why everyone has such fond memories of this masterpiece.

What is Heroes III all about? To put it technically, it is a strategy game in two modes, one-part top-down RPG exploration where you move various heroes you control around a map, and another side-on turn-based combat system. The goal is to control various armies of magical creatures and use them to conquer castles and defeat your enemies. This can be done against AI controlled characters, against friends or even allied with either, or even playing the game’s story campaign. When I say magical creatures, what I really mean is every single being from Western mythology (and some cameos from others) you could possibly imagine. It honestly seems like one designer asked the team which mythologies they should draw upon and another one just dramatically cried, “All of them!”

So there are humans, angels, hydras, dragons, genies, demons, phoenixes, behemoths, wyverns, thunderbirds, gnolls, lizard people and also the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings. The sheer variety of creatures to choose from and the unique playstyle each faction offers is one of my favourite aspects of this game. A lot of this is also very intuitive, since by looking at the types of units each army utilises a lot can be inferred about what their strengths are. For example, the Tower faction features a host of magical creatures, so you can immediately tell that they will be heavily spell-based and potentially use a lot of air-based magic, because…you know…towers are high up.

Gameplay for the most part is quite similar from match to match. After selecting your map, or ‘scenario’, you are dropped into a territory with a castle and are tasked with building up your army by scavenging the environment for resources, troops and artifacts. Then, you must set out to conquer your neighbours, who were trying to do the same, by pitching your armies and magical skills against each other. Certain scenarios have other primary objectives like capture a specific base or find the Holy Grail, but most just have you conquer everything you see. What Heroes III does extremely well is its core visual and audio. Every asset in the game looks like it belongs in a storybook and the animations are as fluid as the tears of nostalgia I have to hold back every time I hear the main menu music. The music itself is also phenomenal. Every faction has its own theme performed by a full orchestra that really nail the themes of each setting, ranging from the dreary Necropolis to the magnificent Castle.

While I could spend forever spouting off praises for this game, I am feeling myself becoming quite biased. Yes, Heroes III does have many spectacular traits that one just does not get from video games nowadays, but it also shows its age in a couple of quite embarrassing ways. For one, it came out in the strange year of 1999, where irony and self-awareness had not yet been invented and taken over as the predominate tone for basically every video game, so at this time they had a habit of taking themselves a bit too seriously. The two expansions for Heroes III are name ‘Armageddon’s Blade’ and ‘Shadow of Death’ just to give an idea of how bad this was. The campaign also has this problem to some extent, though it plays out as essentially a cross between the history channel late at night and budget Lord of the Rings (apologies for mentioning it twice but it is difficult not to). My point being that it is quite basic as far as fantasy plots go, but the excellent gameplay might be enough to keep you through a somewhat basic and predictable story.

Another issue that I have long since overcome in myself by playing it to death is that approaching this game is a mountainous effort. Very little is explained to you at the start of each match or the campaign and there is so much to work out. While I mentioned that one could assess the general playstyle of each faction, it is still entirely up to you to work out how to balance gathering resources, what order to construct the buildings for your base, what troops to get, what skills to give your heroes, what artifacts are worth pursuing and what your chances are for defeating the guy with a hundred dragons who just entered your territory looking for some free real estate. If I did not have my brother to explain it all to me in the first place I would have been incredibly lost, run out of money, died lots of times and eventually given up playing this game altogether. So the fact that you need to be an expert in the game to understand even the most basic fundamentals of the game is a fairly big issue and I would recommend watching some footage of the game yourself before diving into it for the best experience.

To conclude what has been an especially big ramble, even by my standards, I do highly recommend this game. While I mentioned that it is dated, with that also comes the uniqueness from that era of video games. It has its own signature style and elegance with both visuals and sound that still holds up to today’s standards. With varied gameplay that will keep you coming back for more I say that if you have the time, give Heroes III a try. They just do not make games like it anymore.