It's an astoundingly deep game the likes of which I'm sure I will never see the bottom of. Maybe not deep in complexity but deep in the scales of sheer malice, terror, and crashes you could bring about with the might of your army. The third in the series, but as far as many are concerned, this is the only one that exists. For good reason, the game is insanely stylish, quirky, and full of all kinds of amazing powers and scenarios and opportunities to do some crazy stratagems.

I had tried to play the first, but GOG only provided it with a Windows-only poor configuration of the game through an old version of Dosbox, which would cause the game to freeze and crash. When trying to run the game on my own Dosbox-X instance as I usually do, I was hit with a No-CD DRM that should not have been there. With no tools to run the game properly provided by GOG, I had to ask for a refund and put the game aside. Instead of moving along to two, fearing it would have the same Dosbox problem, while I had not yet learned there was a sourceport for 2, I decided to go for 3 because I heard it was the craziest.

On the subject of sourceports, while this game ran well enough on its own, it was not without its hiccups. They got rid of ddraw for this game in favor of a dll that completely broke the game for Linux users, which used to not be the case at all! It used to work entirely fine, and GOG went out of their way to fuck it up! I had to actually hack the game by changing the binary to force ddraw instead of the other method it was using, and it went back to running without a hitch. And then I looked into sourceports to see if it could run even better, and boy could it. VCMI was an astoundingly helpful program that got the game running absolutely perfectly and with easy mod support too!

This game has a pre-rendered graphical look to it, mixed in with the pixel art style you'd have seen in 2. It's absolutely cheesy and beautiful and one of the best things the 90s has to offer. It also has a wonderfully crisp set of silly sound effects and epic fantasy music. The atmosphere is all here. There's an artistic recipe for perfection you could see in those early games that all coalesces here, especially in the silly voice acted and sensational cutscenes of wizards fighting bone lords who get stepped on by the titans and crushed by the gorgons.. But there's also the bone boys, necromancers in their tower, primarily constructed of bones. Sorcerers, metallurgists.. bone sorcerers, and ghost wizards. And there's a huge difference between shadowmancers and shadow slingers..

The gameplay is very easy to pick up for new players and it even comes with a tutorial that's super easy to follow. You move around, you hold territories that generate units and resources. You go back around to pick up more spells from magic towers. As the days go by, you start to be able to chart out more influence with your heroes, generate more units and start to develop terrifying spells and find artifacts. There is no 4X style expansion, you just get to capture enemy territories until you control everything, or destroy everything, I don't know. I'm really bad at this game? For as simple as it is to pick up, you have to really learn how to play the game in the best way or you'll get absolutely curbstomped. Even just against computers. There are people who have been playing this game their whole lives all the way over in eastern europe. I'm scared of them.

A game I'm not going to be putting down any time soon, because there's just too much fun stuff to experiment with and uncover. Strategies to learn, silly little story scenarios to work through. This is a forever game, in its scope. And it's very playable even still through the power of sourceports.

Reviewed on Jan 30, 2026

Playtime: 49 hours in 2024, hundreds overall

Played: 1998-2024, every few years

Intro

HOMM3 is a turn-based strategy game in which you start with one or more towns and heroes. Towns can be upgraded in various ways and provide gold, troops, spells and a few other things. Heroes are generals that let you take your armies across the map, gathering resources, fighting enemies and taking control over buildings. Along the way your hero leans new skills and gains new artifacts.

Ritual

My little brother and i have an informal ritual in which one of us re-installs HOMM3 and replays the skirmish map All For One every few years. It's a sort of video game version of comfort food, just a great map in a great game with no surprises.

During my most recent trip back to Heroes 3 i decided to also give a few other skirmish maps a shot. I have played plenty in the past and tried campaigns to some excent, but i couldn't remember much of it. As it turns out, the game completely holds up, despite poor balance between the factions.

Timelessness

Heroes 3's main strength is that it offers lots of different enemies, troops, artifacts, spells and factions without becoming to complicated. Also you can use some really cheesy tactics if you don't feel confident or have some bad luck. You can play more fairly, of course, but that doomstack of regrowing Vampire Lords is always there if you need it.

Heroes 3 also holds up incredibly well when it comes to graphics and sound. Cutscenes look shockingly decent despite their low resolution. The game itself is very colourful and pleasant. The music and effects are just wonderful too. I played using the amazing VCMI, an open-source engine for Heroes 3 which offers tons of options including higher resolutions, and it was great. Definitely recommend it over HOMM3 HD mod.

Conclusion

If you want to play a turn-based strategy game that isn't too complicated but not a walk in the park either, HOMM3 might be just what you need. Just make sure you get the original version with VCMI instead of the HOMM3 HD remaster which has less content.