4.5/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Songs of Conquest.

Songs of Conquest is absolutely fantastic. A real achievement and a high watermark in the genre. A game of the year contender. The first title by developers Lavapotion, Songs of Conquest is a real homerun for their first at-bat. It's a revitalization of the Heroes of Might and Magic formula. It's not quite a reinvention, lots of the same gameplay mechanics are still here. But it is a marked improvement over the franchise that Ubisoft sank into the ground. Ultimately, I hope it isn't too sacrilegious to say, Songs of Conquest is the best HoMM game ever and certainly better than your nostalgia glasses remember HoMM. Combat is varied, fast, deep. The hero units are engaging and feel unique. Map design is good. The art is fantastic, a gorgeous pixel art design. The music is also quite good. Just top to bottom a really, really fun time. Hopefully now that the game has reached full release we'll get more content. Both from the devs and from the community. The only thing holding the game back from a perfect 5* rating for me is the lack of variety. It's almost a piddly complaint, really. There are five campaigns, each about ten hours long, that'll give you loads of content. Step into some randomly generated maps or multiplayer games and you'll get at least that much content again. We're talking an easy 100 hours of content shipped to you on day one. But given the style of game Songs of Conquest is, 100 hours may just be enough to feel confident in your early mastery of the game. Games like this are the type people play for thousands of hours. Like Age of Wonders or HoMM or Civ or any other strategy game, one expects a gigantic amount of playtime from these sorts of titles. My fear is at the moment, Songs of Conquest just isn't varied _enough_ to stretch that much play time out of without relying on a solid group of dedicated friends to play multiplayer with. You'll get very accustomed to the same enemy types and battle strategies. Again, it'll take you low triple digit playtime to hit this stage. But once you do you'll see the same sorts of stuff repeated a little too much. There won't be enough variety and spice to keep you engaged. This could change though. This is easily a game that could be a perfect 5/5, 10/10, 1,000,000/1,000,000 when it's all said and done. Once more content arrives in the form of mods and patches and DLCs. It's already quite fantastic and I highly, highly recommend it to any strategy gamers out there.