The RPG element of this comes in the form of the Heroes, who lead your armies and back them up with skills and spells. Each new map is a fresh block of marble, ready to be chip-chip-chipped away into your victory, hindered only by the inevitable arrival of other factions and their mightier armies. HOMM III offers both surface and underground layers to first explore, then conquer, and then make use of. It’s a game best defined not by its strategy as such but in the satisfaction of each individual act the turn-based equivalent of looting monsters in something like Diablo, with just about every move adding a little something to your stockpile of gold or gems or units, and building up towns and armies turn by turn, squad by squad, to be able to go from fearing a few wolves hanging around town to being an unstoppable deathball rolling over the whole map. Even with just the base, you get seven campaigns, 50 skirmish maps and a map-editor, and it’s only really the availability of the original that gets in the way. Underneath all this of course, HOMM III remains an excellent game. In terms of raw performance, you also have to put up with a low frame-rate that isn’t a huge issue, but does make the mouse cursor judder unpleasantly on the screen. This version does have Steamworks support for multiplayer, but it’s currently buggy. That’s a bitter pill to choke down, and it’s hard not to feel that this is primarily a port of the game for tablets that’s been thrown onto Steam for good measure. A fair trade for the new graphics? Perhaps, except for one problem-the complete GOG edition is half the price (and even the iPad edition also a couple of quid cheaper…). This one is simply the vanilla original, thanks to the source code having long since been lost. The GOG.COM version is also the complete HOMM3 series, complete with expansion campaigns and most importantly, a random map generator. Put against the original game, the difference isn’t even particularly noticeable.

Updated or not, it was never going to out-shine the prettiness of successors like Age of Wonders III. You don’t get the new sprites that way, but this is a turn-based 2D game from 1999. The original version of HOMMIII is already available on GOG.COM, and fans have long since modded it to run at modern desktop resolutions. The redrawn graphics are okay, if nothing particularly special, but there’s a problem. Instead, it’s hard to recommend anyone buy it.

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