Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is a surprise return to the franchise, and it is a welcome one. While the Heroes franchise had a release in 2015 with Might & Magic Heroes VII, the last mainline title was all the way back in 2006 with Heroes of Might and Magic V. Twenty years is a long time to wait, so I was surprised to see Olden Era’s announcement.
Other studios have tried to live up to this iconic series. Songs of Conquest probably came the closest to reviving the franchise in my eyes, and other titles such as Heroes of Science and Fiction and Songs of Silence are also worth playing. All the same, it is great to see Olden Era come out this year in early access. There is a lot to unpack, and Olden Era does a great job overall.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has a decent amount of content and polish in the launch build, including plenty of skirmish maps, a fleshed-out tutorial, the first part of the campaign mode, multiplayer, and a work-in-progress map editor to tinker with. That is plenty to dig into for this Early Access launch, and the first thing I did was jump into the tutorial. It does a great job of teaching players the mechanics, and while Olden Era is not the most complex of strategy games, I recommend people check the tutorials out.
To those unfamiliar with the Might and Magic franchise, the gameplay loop is relatively straightforward. Players take on heroes, exploring an expansive fantasy world, building up armies, and managing cities. Locations provide buffs and resources, with enemy armies roaming the land and defending important places like temples and caves. They get stronger as time passes, so you need a careful balance.
If you wade in too soon, your army might not be strong enough to deal with the bands of monsters, who are typical pests. Wait too long, and the armies might be too powerful to handle. It’s a good way to dynamically change the gameplay of a map, and I quite like how the game approaches this. Usually, heroes have limited movement per turn that can sometimes be replenished by map pickups, but the campaign will have phases where you have free exploration as much as you please, which is fun. Between the settlement management, researching buildings, training armies, and exploration, there is always something to do.
The battles are what one might expect for the genre. They are turn-based on a hex-grid battlefield, where you can move units around and slaughter everything in your path like every healthy-minded person likes to do in their life. Olden Era provides some nice tactical options, including unit abilities, a huge array of spells that can be used offensively or defensively, and your champion hero can also attack units. There is also an autobattle function if you just want to spectate, although I have found the casualty rate will likely be higher than just fighting yourself. This is what happens when I delegate to my lessers. I had to execute so many of my minions for their mistakes.
On the campaign, I was pleasantly surprised by the production quality on this. We only have access to the first portion of this campaign at launch, and I really hope we get more of the story sooner rather than later. While the narrative involves the usual fantasy shenanigans, I rather enjoyed the premise. A mysterious, eternal fire has infected parts of the Olden world, turning people insane and devastating villages. That is a damn cool idea, to be honest.
You get to play as a big, minotaur general guy whose queen is a giant dragon, with the job of investigating what is behind the pestilence. While there is no voice acting during missions, we get some great, semi-animated cutscenes with gorgeous art and voice acting then. A lot of care has gone into the campaign so far, and I have found the maps to be the right mix of challenge while allowing for plenty of exploration. I love level design when the landscape itself can be a captivating character, and Olden Era’s map design makes it a delight to play. The visuals and music are great across the board.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is keen to make up for a difficult decade in the series, and the Early Access version of the game impressed me in both its scope and gameplay. I only have two gripes right now besides the usual early access conundrum of playing an unfinished experience, and those are performance and tiny text. While I did not encounter many bugs, Olden Era can be tricky to run well. It might not be Baldur's Gate 3, but there is plenty of environmental eye candy on these maps, and that ate into the Deck’s processing power. This is no dealbreaker, and optimization is in the works, but it is something to consider.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has a Playable rating through Valve, while ProtonDB’s rating is Platinum. The main issues listed include small in-game text and requiring the use of a keyboard for some functions. Handheld fans will be happy to hear that, for the most part, Olden Era runs fairly well on the Steam Deck, although there are a few caveats to contend with.
Right now, there is no interface scaling to speak of, so some in-game text is very challenging to read on the Steam Deck. More than once, I had to use the magnifier function to get by, and it was an uncomfortable experience for my old man eyes. Hopefully, UI scaling is high on the developer’s agenda, as it would help a long way. I also recommend manually changing the joystick sensitivity in the Steam Deck’s controller settings to 50%. Right now, there is no option within the game to adjust this, and by default, the controls are a little loose.
Performance-wise, I did not have any major issues, and a Keyboard (WASD) and Mouse profile did everything I needed to have a good time with Olden Era. I did have to use a low graphics preset, however, to deal with all the environmental effects on screen. The game is surprisingly intensive even on modern PC hardware, and is very easy on the eyes. Don’t even try to lower TDP with Olden Era right now, because even with the default TDP, the game struggled to hit 60FPS on low settings, and it ate through the battery. Locking the frame rate to 30FPS/90hz refresh rate was disappointing, but at least the game was stable with the cap.
With these settings, I saw around 12 watts on average, which provides around 4 hours of battery life on the Steam Deck OLED. I’m sure that with a few patches, the performance will improve. For now, Olden Era is playable on the Steam Deck with some issues.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
Olden Era is a strange mix of good and bad as accessibility options go. There are a bunch of nice colorblind options like tweaking the colors on screen, Vsync, invert camera, edge scrolling, camera panning speed, and move speed. You can also change keybinds, although no dedicated controller support is in the game at launch, and a decent number of graphical options to tweak.
The lack of mouse scrolling speed can be managed as mentioned, but the small text size and lack of UI scaling were significant hurdles for me on the Steam Deck. This is a dialogue-heavy game with a lot of text and tooltips on screen, and it was challenging to read them properly without getting eye strain. Not everyone will have this issue, and it’s not a dealbreaker, but it is important to note.
I seem to be the go-to guy for the Hooded Horse publisher library of video games here, and Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era shows great promise from what I have played. It might be Early Access with a long way to go, but the content and mechanics on offer are plentiful, and fans of the genre will appreciate the core gameplay and the narrative in the campaign. Plenty of skirmish maps, multiplayer, and the map editor at launch offer enough on the buffet table, and so far, I really like how Olden Era is shaping up.
It needs work with optimization, and I want to see gamepad support for certain. The experience on the Steam Deck is a little rough due to the tiny text size and controller issues, but there is plenty of time for fixes to come in.
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Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is an impressive return to the series with solid gameplay, although as an early access title it does need some work. It is also playable on the Steam Deck.
