The Heroes of Might and Magic lineage is a graveyard of good intentions. Ubisoft's 2015 attempt with Might and Magic Heroes VII shipped in a state that felt like a public beta. Heroes VI before it gutted the series' town-building loop in favour of a dynasty system nobody asked for. So when a small Swedish studio called Lavapotion announced Songs of Conquest — a clear spiritual heir, pixel art and all — the reasonable response was cautious curiosity, not excitement. Fool me twice and all that.
After 32 hours across the campaign and a handful of skirmish maps, cautious curiosity has turned into something closer to genuine respect. This is a turn-based strategy game that understands why the formula worked in the first place, and it has the discipline to leave most of it intact. That does not mean it has no problems. It does. But for the first time in a long time, a game in this tradition actually earns the comparison it is reaching for.
The Wielder System Is Doing Heavy Lifting
The central mechanical twist in Songs of Conquest is the Wielder — your hero equivalent. Where classic Heroes titles let you stack practically unlimited spells and ability growth onto a single lord, Lavapotion constrains things through Essence. Every unit in your army generates a specific type of Essence during combat: Arcane from your mages, Brutal from your infantry, and so on. Spells cost Essence. You can only cast what your army composition allows you to generate. It is an elegant system because it ties your magic economy directly to your tactical decisions about recruitment.
In practice it punishes the habit — common in older HoMM games — of treating armies as mere Essence-generating batteries for an all-powerful hero. A Wielder here is powerful but tethered. Play the Arleon campaign's second chapter and you will feel this acutely: the temptation to hoard Arcane units for big spells is constantly fighting against the need for front-line Brutal fighters to absorb punishment. Getting that balance right feels like solving a puzzle rather than following an upgrade path.
The downside is that the system's ceiling is a little low. By the later skirmish maps, you start to identify optimal compositions fairly quickly. The strategic variance that makes something like Into the Breach endlessly replayable is not quite here. Lavapotion has built something more like a satisfying lock-and-key puzzle than a generative system. That is fine. It is just worth knowing before you sink fifty hours expecting constant surprises.
The Map Design Is Where Lavapotion Earns Its Stars
Whatever reservations exist about long-term depth, the adventure map work is close to flawless. Songs of Conquest maps are dense with interactable objects, branching paths, and those satisfying secondary resource nodes that make every move feel like a small decision. The verticality introduced by the game's layered terrain — passages that cut between elevated and lowland areas — adds genuine route-planning tension that the HoMM series only gestured toward.
The third campaign map in the Rana faction's storyline is a good example. It drops you on a swampy island with minimal starting forces, surrounded by watchtowers that expand enemy vision. You cannot rush. You have to earn every territory incrementally, scouting with cheap units before committing your Wielder. It creates the kind of slow-burn tension that strategy games live and die by, and it does it through map construction rather than artificial difficulty spikes.
The procedurally generated skirmish maps are noticeably weaker. They tend toward a central-corridor layout that neutralises the vertical routing options the handcrafted missions exploit so well. If Lavapotion can improve the skirmish generator in updates, the game's replayability jumps considerably. Right now, the campaign is the thing.
Combat Is Readable, Though Rarely Revelatory
Turn-based tactical combat in Songs of Conquest is clean and readable. Units operate on a shared initiative track, abilities have consistent visual telegraphing, and the hex grid never feels like it is working against you. For players coming from Wartales or the older King's Bounty titles, the learning curve is practically flat. The interface communicates threat and opportunity well.
What it lacks is the kind of emergent chaos that makes something like XCOM 2's combat memorable years later. Fights in Songs of Conquest tend to resolve predictably once you understand the Essence economy. There are no cover systems producing dramatic near-misses, no environmental hazards, no terrain-altering spells that reshape the battlefield mid-engagement. The combat is in service of the strategy layer, and that is probably the correct priority. But players wanting tactically dense individual battles might find themselves slightly underwhelmed.
The exception is the high-level spell interactions. Combining a Brutal-fuelled area suppression with an Arcane precision strike on the same turn produces satisfying payoffs that reward attention to your army composition. These moments are good enough that you wish the system was stretched a little further.
The Presentation Punches Well Above Its Budget
Songs of Conquest looks extraordinary for what is, by any honest measure, a small studio production. The pixel art is hand-animated with genuine care — troop idle animations, environmental weather effects, Wielder spell sequences. The art direction favours muted, earthy palettes broken by the vivid colour of magical effects, which means combat readability stays high even when the screen is busy. Lavapotion clearly studied Supergiant's approach to high-resolution pixel art and understood the assignment.
The soundtrack, composed by Mateusz Kamecki, is worth noting independently. It is not ambient wallpaper. The faction-specific themes have actual melodic identity — the Barya merchant faction's music carries a tense mercantile energy, the Rana swamp pieces are appropriately foreboding without becoming tiresome over long sessions. Games at this budget level often treat audio as an afterthought. This one does not.
Performance is solid on mid-range hardware, though late-game maps with large armies can introduce noticeable slowdown during AI turns. It is not game-breaking, but it is the kind of thing that breaks immersion during tense endgame sequences. A patch priority, hopefully.
Where the Game Still Has Work to Do
The AI is the most consequential weak point. On standard difficulty it plays the economic game adequately, expanding and recruiting at a reasonable pace. But its tactical combat decision-making is conservative to a fault. It rarely uses Essence spells at optimal moments, and it tends to engage in unfavourable battles rather than retreating and consolidating. Players who know the systems well will find standard difficulty too forgiving within a few hours.
The narrative framing across the campaigns is functional rather than compelling. The Arleon storyline makes a reasonable effort at political intrigue between noble houses, but the writing rarely rises above serviceable. This is not a game that will be discussed for its storytelling. That is fine — the HoMM series never asked to be Planescape: Torment — but players coming from Larian's recent work on Baldur's Gate 3 will feel the gap.
Multiplayer, which was added during the Early Access period, is functional but lacks ranked infrastructure or robust matchmaking. For a game built around the kind of competitive map-reading that makes synchronous play genuinely tense, that feels like a missed opportunity. The tools are there. The ecosystem to support them is not.
The Verdict
Songs of Conquest is the first game in this tradition since Heroes of Might and Magic III to make the formula feel loved rather than licensed. Lavapotion has not reinvented the genre. They have done something arguably harder — they have understood it well enough to make it function again, with enough of their own ideas to justify the exercise.
The AI needs work. The skirmish generator needs work. The long-term strategic variance could go deeper. None of that is small. But the Wielder system, the map design, the Essence economy, the presentation — these are not approximations of good ideas. They are good ideas, executed with care by a team that clearly spent years thinking about what they wanted to build.
Thirty-two hours in, the game still has me planning one more turn before bed. After the last decade of this genre's history, that is not something to dismiss lightly.
Verdict
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Gameplay | 7/10 |
| Story | 8/10 |
| Visuals | 7/10 |
| Replayability | 6/10 |
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to finish Songs of Conquest Finally Earns Its Heroes Lineage?
Main story runs around 18-25 hours depending on how thoroughly you explore. Completionists can spend 2-3× that.
Is Songs of Conquest Finally Earns Its Heroes Lineage good for newcomers to Turn-based Strategy?
For total newcomers, expect a 5-8 hour ramp-up. Once you internalize the loop, it clicks.
Which platform should I play Songs of Conquest Finally Earns Its Heroes Lineage on?
Console version is the most stable on launch. PC version benefits from the modding scene long-term.
Was Songs of Conquest Finally Earns Its Heroes Lineage worth the launch-day price?
Released in 2024, and as of writing it holds up. Wait for a sale if you're price-sensitive — major discounts arrive within 6 months.
Are there DLCs or expansions worth picking up?
Wait for the Game of the Year edition — it bundles everything at a fair discount.
What did Lavapotion get right (and what could be better)?
The systems are confident and the combat is satisfying. The story handoffs and load times are the rough spots.
Comments
Comments are moderated. Be civil — disagreement is fine, abuse isn't.
My partner and I have been doing hotseat sessions on this and it holds up really well for that format, which is surprisingly rare in the genre. Most of these games are designed for solo campaigns and the multiplayer feels tacked on. SoC actually seems like it was playtested by people sitting in the same room.
Worth noting that the Arleon faction still has some balance issues in the current build — spellcasters snowball pretty hard if you get the right relics early. Doesn't undercut the article's larger point, but calling it fully 'earned' might be slightly premature. The bones are right, the tuning is ongoing.
never played any of the old heroes games so i came in completely fresh and honestly it just felt like a really solid strategy game. the lineage stuff doesnt mean much to me but the game itself is great
Earns its lineage is a weird way to put it — Lavapotion never claimed the lineage, Ubisoft still owns that IP. Spiritual successor and legal heir are pretty different things.
Heroes VII broke something in me, genuinely. I preordered it, played through the launch disaster, filed bug reports that went nowhere, and then just... stopped believing anyone could get this genre right again. Lavapotion being a small studio is exactly what saved Songs of Conquest, I think — no publisher breathing down their neck to ship for a holiday window. The town-building loop being intact is the part I keep coming back to. That's the heartbeat of the whole genre and Heroes VI ripped it out like it was a vestigial organ. Good piece.
the pixel art alone got me to wishlist it but the actual strategy layer is so much deeper than i expected
The 'graveyard of good intentions' framing is catchy but it flattens a lot. Heroes V — Nival's version, not the expansions — was genuinely excellent and held the community for years. The lineage isn't a straight decline, it's more like every third entry being a disaster. Also laying all of Heroes VI's problems at the dynasty system feels like revisionism; the simultaneous online requirement and the always-online town screen were the actual killers for most players. I agree Songs of Conquest is good. I just think the article earns its conclusion by caricaturing the history a little.