Songs of Conquest

TL;DR: If you want an in-the-moment sandbox strategy/tactical experience, this is not for you. If you enjoy restarting a campaign for the fifth time after discovering all the curveballs the developers scripted into it, then writing down the “correct” order of events to cheese your way through, this might be for you. I rarely refund games, maybe once every hundred purchases or so, but this one is simply not for me. I was lured in by the recent “Very Positive” rating, but after playing it, “Mostly Positive” feels much more accurate. Reading through the reviews, you quickly notice that many of the positive ones would probably be neutral if Steam actually allowed that option. I cannot fathom why developers still build games around outdated design patterns like puzzle-like, step-by-step sudoku scenarios. This is the strategy-game equivalent of old shooters spawning enemies behind you to create cheap “gotcha” moments. The difficulty does not come from deep strategy or tactical mastery. It comes from memorizing scripted event patterns, avoiding triggers, and cheesing the hell out of the scenario. I also do not understand why so many Heroes of Might and Magic fans compare this game to HoMM. I am a HoMM fan myself, and this is not HoMM. It is not Disciples, not Etherlords, not King’s Bounty, and not anything meaningfully similar beyond surface-level presentation. This is not really a strategy game. It barely even works as a tactical game. Games like HoMM, especially HoMM III and IV, lean heavily into the fantasy of: “Here is the scenario, go wild, explore, abuse the systems, and become unstoppable.” You side quest, collect resources, clear neutral stacks, cheese tactical battles to preserve units, and snowball while the main objective patiently waits for you. That is the spirit of HoMM. Songs of Conquest actively works against that spirit. The campaign is too authored, too scripted, and too trigger-based. Instead of letting you develop a strategy organically, it pushes you into discovering the intended order of operations. If your campaign runs on rails and the main challenge is finding out which events to trigger in which order, that is not strategy. That is a puzzle game. The fact that there are step-by-step guides for higher difficulties says a lot. Why build a magic system, a combat system, itemization, buildings, resources, recruitment, faction mechanics, and all these strategic layers if the campaign design then reduces everything to a sudoku? And I have not even gone into the terrible UX, the terrible UI, the terrible design decisions, and the barebones, boring story. And yes, UX, UI, design, and art are different things.

Songs of Conquest is a spiritual successor to Heroes of Might and Magic. I've played a little bit of HoMM before, but never got into them. SoC, however, managed to succeed in being a fun experience for me. You command Wielders, heroes who lead your army into battle against opposing factions. Your Wielders can traverse the map, claiming settlements, resources, and points of interest in the hopes of building an army strong enough to defeat your enemies. Each Wielder has a Command skill that determines how many different units they can bring into battle, and each unit can "stack" up to a pre-determined number of times to increase their health and offense. On level-up, your Wielder can learn one of two randomly presented skills, or increase their Command skill to field more units. In combat, your wielder does not actually participate directly. Instead, your units provide Essence that powers your Wielders magic. Each unit, regardless of their stack size, will provide essence at the start of their turn. This seems to encourage "splitting stacks" so that you'll have more essence per round, but the trade off is a unit that can be killed more quickly due to the smaller stack size, which in turn gives the enemy army a Momentum buff that increases Offense and Defense. It's a balancing act that requires constant adjustments depending on what you expect to face. The spells themselves come in five schools, with each school containing four spells. Additionally, there are various "dyad" spells, which require two flavors of magic to cast. At tier 1, spells seem helpful, but not overbearing. However, if a Wielder manages to learn higher tiers of Essence types, those spells quickly become devastating. This is sort of where the game becomes overwhelming. Against random, neutral enemies on the map, spell casting is a powerful tool to help you punch higher than your weight class. Against other Wielders (who level up their magic), though, it essentially becomes a Power Slap match where the two sides just wail on each other. That stack of dragons you spent so much time and gold building up to? Deleted in an instant by the Judgement spell. Your strongest unit? They only do a quarter of their damage now, thanks to Pacify. Your Wielder didn't learn Spell Resistance? Expect Acid Clouds and Meteors to devastate your back lines. There are no "per turn" casting limits; if a Wielder has enough essence to spam spells, then they can spam to their heart's content. Add in ways to start combat with an immediate pool of Essence, and battles essentially open with the strongest units getting nuked or neutered immediately. I won't call this good or bad. It's satisfying to use your spells to get a flawless victory when the Auto-battler had you taking losses. On the other hand, I hate fighting enemy Wielders because, as I said before, it feels like we're just playing Power Slap with our spells. When units actually get to fight, I've found the combat has pretty good depth. Maps come with various features that can alter your plans: chokepoints to funnel melee, elevations to improve your ranged attacks, barricades that can be destroyed if needed. Furthermore, the game features mechanics that I didn't see in other HoMM type games. Ranged units can't shoot the whole map with impunity; they have a "Deadly Range" where they deal max damage, but have an additional extended Range for less, but safer shots. They also don't cover the whole map (at least not by default), so moving and shooting typically incurs additional damage penalties. Melee units possess attacks of opportunity, so they can take a swing on anyone trying to get past them, and there aren't any units that don't completely disrespect the terrain and just fly over everyone across the map to attack the backlines. These are all big reasons why I bounced off other HoMM types games I've tried, so it was good to see SoC vibed with my expectations of how combat should work. The game has four campaigns, each containing four missions. The stories are surprisingly good. Without spoiling too much, the first campaign starts as a typical, scrappy, "Lawful Good" underdog trying to get a handle on all the problems of their kingdom, but seeds are planted of their faults that sprout in the later campaigns when you see things from the other sides. The one problem I have with the campaigns is they have a "Main Hero can't lose" objective. Your other heroes can die and resurrect as much as you can afford it, but you'll need to save constantly so you can reload when your main hero gets caught with their pants down. Aside from the campaigns, you can also play "Conquests" which have all players start from scratch, much like a typical "4X" type of game. There are pre-made maps, designed for balance or around some interesting feature, but you can also have the game generate random maps if that's your cup-of-tea. There is no MVP hero in this mode, so you don't have to worry about losing the whole game because one particular wielder was ganked. There are four factions in the base game, and while they have different units, there aren't any faction specific mechanics to worry about (except maybe Loth getting Zombies after battle for each Human they've lost, but that might be for the Campaign only). This makes it fairly easy to hop between the different factions, once you understand the keyword differences between them. This game has the best Steam Deck/Controller UI I've seen for a game that I would've thought requires mouse-and-keyboard. It doesn't cover all keyboard functionality, but I easily hit the ground running on the Deck thanks to how everything was laid out. Overall, this is a fun game, with a solid campaign that I recommend to fans of HoMM or 4X games.

This game has some things i love and some i do not like. So i will list them and explain my thoughts on the major ones. Likes first. 1. The town building system and way it is different and unique i enjoy. This is not to say it is better than heroes type setups but it is good and i like the idea and fresh take. my only slight gripe is sometimes the daily spawns but this is minor and while a bit tedious at times this overall for me is still a positive. 2. Magic system. This is more a mixed but overall I like the originality and idea of units fueling essences etc. it is a neat and unique take. the negatives is it somewhat forces stacking some units in multiple to achieve the best results and can get incredibly powerful if not overpowered late to a point i nuke entire enemy teams before they can even touch me. 3. art design and overall feel of maps and such I enjoy. it has its own feel and i just enjoy it. 4. Units overall are solid. there are not a ton but that has expanded and it has overall been a positive point for me. the unit abilities are a nice touch and again magic building off clever unit allocation is nice. The things i do not like. 1. UNIT CAPS and yes it is caps for a reason. this is by far the largest issue i have and it ties in to the next one. I know some people enjoy it but as a co-op and single player guy i love using multiple huge stacks of my favorite units and not having forced limitations. This has never affected my strategy or choices much.. it has simply made the game less fun and taken away some of the joy of huge fights with a totally different feel vs early game with limited units. That variety and variation in approach most heroes games had was fun. i tended to alter my strategy a lot more based on the AI/other players units and stacks and versatility. (not having access to multiple units types was also here but was changed in an update so kudos to this). 2. The heavy pvp focus. I know there is a hungry pvp community in this genre but in the end the majority of players don't relish in it. the extremely exact maps and all balance changes to focus to pvp are a big turnoff for me and i would much prefer more focus on pve and co-op 3. No random map generation. its a simple massive replayability thing. it also fixes issue 2 in many cases. I want huge silly maps with no real specific focus or design. it allows new experiences each game and creates unknown things to find. This is just a necessary staple of these kind of games. 4. The artifacts and items system often really lacks some unique items and often is just boosts to specific things. Some boosts are just always by far better and make most items obsolete. This also was somewhat true in heroes though they had far more variety over time. Obviously this can and likely will be improved (has some already) Overall SoC is not a bad game but not great either. if i could do a neutral here i would as i can feel the labor of love and definitely do enjoy parts of the game. The unit caps/pvp focus and lack of random generator are big issues for me and why since i have to pick i chose not to recommend yet. If those issues got adjusted/resolved some I would certainly give this a thumbs up at that time.

If I had known this game would nickel and dime you for most of its content (The EPIC formula), I would have never touched it.

Honestly the game and art style are really fun. I'm not recommending because the game seems unfinished. The DLC seems like it should already be part of the base game. Its easy to get tired of playing just the same factions. I would change my review if the other factions were just included.

Songs of Conquest is a great, modern take on a Heroes of Might and Magic-style game mixed with a campaign that's reminiscent of Warcraft 3. It was fun to play through the campaign, and I appreciate a lot of the improvements they've made that fit well in today's design-space.

Light 8 /10

Really nice game. Excellent hotseat mode if you want to play local. I personally enjoy the pixel art style. I think it looks sharp and adds to overall character of the game. It has a streamlined interface and its general simplicity (compared to others in the genre) make it a fairly intuitive, pick up and play game. It's very accessible for new players, and the play times are generally short enough that a game could be completed in an afternoon. If you want a mildly complex turn based multiplayer game with shorter playtimes, this is pretty hard to beat. If you a looking for a complex 4x, with lots of dynamic systems, this may not impress you. In my opinion the gameplay is solid and fun. I think the 3D pixel art style is excellent and adds a lot of character to the game. Songs of Conquest is a fun, easy to understand game that feels unique, polished, and well worth the money.

TLDR: If you were/are a HoMM3 fan and are longing for a good, modern game based on the HoMM formula, then you should definitely give this game a long, hard look. This is, by far, the best HoMM remake of a game I've seen so far. It doesn't just dress up the HoMM 3 formula in a new set of clothes and slap an original name on it, but genuinely improves upon the already great foundations of the genre. Instead of a simple remake Songs of Conquest is a reimagining of what made HoMM so great. It is bold enough to change core mechanics and features in ways that, in my opinion, improve upon the formula greatly. Gone are doomstacks as in Songs of Conquest all stacks are severely limited. Gone is the RNG of what spells you get to research as all spells are available to all players from the very start. Gone is your generic mana pool, but instead every unit generates one, or more, out of five types of "essence" (i.e. specialized mana) on each of its turns, which allows you to cast the spells that require those particular types of essence, basically making your troop composition your "spellbook". Towns are upgraded a lot more flexibly and you can build multiple of the same unit lair if you so desire, making for more flexibility. The list goes on. On top of that the game is presented in a truly beautiful pixelart style throughout and makes your stay in the Songs of Conquest universe all the more pleasant with equally beautiful and atmospheric music. Unlike HoMM3 the world feels fleshed out, busy, alive and everything can blend together so well that it look like a pixelart landscape photo. That also makes finding point of interest that much harder, but the game offers a highlight function to correct for that. All units are rendered fantastically well too and their animations are just as fitting. In terms of presentation the game is a feast for your eyes and ears, provided you like pixelart in general. All factions feel unique, offer a different playstyle and the units are genuinely original. A lot of the more specialized ones come with cool new abilities not seen in a HoMM game. Learning to play one faction does not mean you automatically learn how to play the rest, which is a good thing. That being said the base game comes with only four of them, which is way too few for my taste, but that is corrected with DLC, which albeit pricey (compared relatively to the price of the base game), does add, at the point of time of writing this, another three great and fleshed out factions, with their own terrain themes, map objects and buildings and equally unique playstyles. The complete package is a very well-rounded game that can offer easily hundreds of hours of enjoyment. On the negative side - even though the maps can be so beautiful, fleshed out and detailed, there is simply not that many of them as a result, especially if you are looking for quality maps on the bigger size since those are pretty laborious to create. Somewhat correcting for this is the fact that the game ships with a really well made map editor, which albeit having some quirks, allows people to create their own maps, as they see fit. The integrated ability to generate random maps along a set of parameters makes starting a map project much easier as the editor allows you to create one, up to a certain size, and them modify it to suit your tastes. Maps, and mods, are shared on Mod.io, making it platform-independent, even if the integrated functionality of sharing and downloading maps is pretty rudimentary. All in all, this is a fantastic HoMM reimagining that, in my opinion, every HoMM fan should try out and absolutely recommend it.

素材はいいが色々極端 相性差が大きすぎて戦力倍あっても余裕で駆逐される じっくり腰を戦う事は許されない とにかく相手を先んじて先手を打ち、攻め続ける行動が求められる 相手に遅れずとも、同格になられた時点で勝ち筋がなくなる 自爆特攻、死兵による投入も相性の前ではミリも削れない 総力戦になれば追い返せるが補充間に合わず 相性による生産効率差で押し切られ敗北のパターンが本当に多かった