Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has a singular mission: resurrect the turn-based strategy template that made 1999's third entry a landmark achievement. The Early Access release isn't polished, but it builds a compelling case for why that era remains the franchise's creative peak.
The core loop hasn't changed much, and that's precisely the point. You manage heroes and towns across a top-down map, sending armies out to loot resources, recruit troops, and crush anything in your way through grid-based tactical combat. The overworld teems with buildings, monuments, and points of interest that reward exploration with gold, materials, magical items, and faction-aligned units. There's genuine satisfaction in discovering what lies beyond the next hill, though that sense of surprise fades once you've absorbed the map's rhythm.
Randomization keeps things unpredictable between playthroughs. The locations of key resources shuffle each game, and enemy strength remains deliberately obscured at first, though Olden Era removes some of the mystery by openly flagging whether a fight is advisable. This creates tension: do you push for a crypt now and risk an opponent claiming it, or hold back and consolidate power? The downside is that randomness can make endgame equipment sets feel mathematically unreachable.
Six Factions With Real Identity
The six playable factions are where the game truly flexes. Temple returns as the haven-aligned holy warriors. Inferno has been reimagined as Hive, swapping demons for molten bugs that overwhelm through melee pressure. Schism, a brand-new addition, presents icy water-cursed elves corrupted by extraplanar horrors. Dungeon's mix of teleporting dark elves, minotaurs, and dragons lets you do almost anything. Grove demands heavy investment to unlock their potential. Each tier of units from tier one grunts to tier seven juggernauts feels mechanically distinct, with many sporting powerful abilities you activate during battle by spending focus points.
Unit diversity is genuine. A Hive Parasite damages high-tier creatures more effectively than frontline bruisers. Sylvan Fauns can upgrade into either archers or sword-wielding melee fighters. Most upgrades lack this clarity, though, and tooltips don't yet illuminate what makes each choice meaningful. The balance puzzle is ongoing, as expected in Early Access, and figuring out whether an underperforming faction reflects poor tuning or demanding playstyle is part of the current conversation.
Heroes feel less inspired. Their portrait art radiates personality, but their mechanical identity gets drowned in randomness. Spellbooks are drawn from a generic pool and learned semi-randomly, which means magic playstyles depend entirely on lucky building placement and luck during hero leveling. Subclass advancement requires five skills from a random pool, but you only gain eight total, making the grind tedious. The result: many heroes cast whatever spells happen to drop rather than thematic magic that matches their character.
Settlements suffer similar identity collapse. You build the same structures with the same progression path regardless of faction, despite beautiful visual distinction. The Temple's scouting tower is nice. The Grove's instant-travel Mycelium Roots is a game-changer. That inequality signals that unique faction buildings haven't been balanced fairly yet.
Combat Where Depth Matters
Battles are where Olden Era shines. You move units across a hex grid to outposition enemies, managing melee units (high-risk, high-reward), long-reach attackers, and ranged forces. The system's real sophistication lives in initiative manipulation. Unlike older Heroes entries where Bless and Stoneskin solved everything, Olden Era makes speed-altering spells like Web and Ice Bolt genuinely valuable for breaking stalemates. First halves of turns often devolve into valuable units staring each other down while players manipulate turn order, which is tactically interesting even if it occasionally feels static.
Terrain and traps add texture, though battles can feel repetitive across different maps. The simplicity of attack options is elegant, but it nudges players toward ranged armies instinctively, since melee feels unnecessarily risky.
Campaign Stumbles, Arena Shines
Campaign mode is the weakest offering. Playing as Gunnar, a Dungeon faction minotaur investigating an existential threat, you get story-driven missions with meaningful alliance choices. The concept works. Execution doesn't. Unskippable cutscenes drag, bugs crop up including progression-blocking quests, and most critically, the mode disables half the game's systems. You can't access advanced subclasses or the law research tree, and many city buildings are locked. It's the worst way to learn Olden Era, especially for newcomers.
Arena mode is the opposite: a draft-based combat tournament where you assemble heroes, spells, artifacts, and armies like a trading card game, then battle opponents. It's punishing randomness in its purest form, but perfect for testing synergies without committing to full campaign runs.
Classic mode remains the intended experience: pure competitive strategy against AI or online opponents. Single-Hero mode adds a refreshing constraint, forcing all your faction's power into one roaming hero. It appeals to veterans seeking focused runs and new players wanting to avoid system overload.
Author Emily Chen: "Olden Era captures what made Heroes 3 essential, but it's still wrestling with balance and identity problems that go beyond Early Access rough edges. The combat system and faction depth are genuinely strong, but heroes and settlements need personality injections that randomness keeps stripping away."
Comments