Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era Returns and Reclaims Its Throne - Early Access Review

The turn-based strategy genre has experienced a decade of improbable resurrections and broken promises. On one hand, titles like Age of Wonders 4 and Songs of Conquest have shown that there is still an audience willing to invest hours in map resource management, army building, and tactical battles on a hexagonal grid.

On the other hand, the name Heroes of Might and Magic has remained like a faded sign: the last mainline chapter worthy of memory dates back to 2006, and the 2015 attempt, Might & Magic Heroes VII, left the historical fanbase with a bitter certainty: that the franchise had become an asset for Ubisoft to exploit rather than cultivate. The strategy followed by the French publisher in chapters VI and VII was one of cost containment at the expense of quality: small studios, compressed budgets, poor supervision, predictable results. In this decade-long void, the franchise ceded space to its spiritual heirs, who managed to cultivate the niche without ever claiming its throne.

Olden Era is born from an opposite logic. Unfrozen, an international studio founded in 2016 in St. Petersburg, presented Ubisoft with an idea and a demo, proposing a fan game made for fans. The proposal was accepted, and Hooded Horse joined the project as publisher. This is not a neutral detail: Hooded Horse is the label that has already shown it can support small teams on ambitious titles (do you remember Manor Lords, Against the Storm, and Old World?) without sacrificing the original vision to the imperatives of the mass market.

The result enters Early Access a few days ago with a radically simple proposal: don't rewrite the rules, but respect them. The point is to understand to what extent the intellectual honesty of this operation stands up to the legacy it carries, and where the construction site is still visible.

Olden Era is a prequel with a true declaration of intent

Olden Era is set on Enroth, the world of the first three chapters of the series, which purists consider the only legitimate canon. The chosen continent is Jadame, already present in Might & Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer, but never before explored in the Heroes series. The story follows Gunnar, a minotaur who discovers a new threat to the world: the Hive faction, a corrupting entity that devastates the lands of Jadame under the guidance of the Dragonfly King. To confront this threat, the rival factions of the continent are forced to form a temporary alliance. It's a narrative archetype as simple as it is epic.

The choice of Jadame as the setting is not accidental: it is virgin territory in the Heroes series, which allows Unfrozen to build without contradicting the historical memory of the fanbase. It's the same strategy Tolkien applied when writing about eras preceding already narrated events, if you think about it.

The campaign, non-linear in its setup, albeit with a defined narrative structure by acts, gradually introduces the game systems with intelligent pedagogy: the first act begins with only one hero on the field, allowing the player to internalize the rhythms without the competitive pressure that will emerge later. The production is surprisingly well-crafted for an Early Access, with narrative sequences that go beyond the genre's minimum requirements. The limit is only quantitative: the current build covers only a part of the game that will be. Those who exhaust the available narrative content will have to wait for updates to proceed, and this, in a game that also sells on the attraction of the story, is a constraint that the post-launch roadmap will have to honor punctually.

Combat in Olden Era takes place on a hexagonal chessboard separate from the adventure map — a division that the series has adopted since its origins and which here finds a visually refined realization. Armies are organized into unit stacks: a stack can contain from one to hundreds of creatures of the same type, with aggregated HP but unitary behavior. The hero does not physically participate in the melee — they remain at the edge of the field, from where they can occasionally attack or cast spells from their repertoire. This separation between the leader and the combatant is part of the genre's grammar, and in Olden Era it is not altered.

Tactical depth emerges from the interaction between the passive and active abilities of each unit type, initial placements, action point management per turn, and, above all, the risk of friendly fire in area-of-effect magic.

The Economy of War: Resources, Heroes, Artifacts, and the Cost of Every Choice

The core of Olden Era is recognizable in a few minutes for anyone who has ever moved a pixelated hero on a fantasy map in the nineties. You explore a territory collecting resources, capturing buildings that produce units, building cities, and confronting neutral armies that guard points of interest. The temporal structure is marked by daily turns: each hero has a fixed number of movement points, and every decision has a precise opportunity cost. Going to retrieve a sulfur deposit means not reinforcing the city garrison, or taking a distant artifact risks leaving a gap open for enemy forces.

This logic works because the resource system is not decorative. Olden Era manages seven distinct resource types (gold, wood, ore, sulfur, crystals, gems, and mercury), each required in different quantities by the specific constructions of each faction. This is not cosmetic granularity: the composition of resources present on the map influences which building to construct first, which faction is penalized in certain scenarios, and which unit line is viable in the initial phases.

Heroes grow with experience. Each accumulated combat brings experience points, and each level up offers a choice between passive and active abilities that redefine the hero's role in the overall composition. A magic-oriented hero with abilities that amplify spell power functions radically differently from one specialized in direct combat or unit support. This is not an aesthetic distinction but is the main source of build diversity in the game, and the interaction between chosen abilities and the hero's attack and defense statistics significantly amplifies or reduces the performance of unit stacks. Those who ignore this synergy will find themselves with nominally strong armies that perform below their potential.

Artifacts complete the progression picture. Distributed on the adventure map as rewards for difficult battles or hidden in specific structures, they modify the hero's statistics (magic power, initiative, resistance) and can unlock equipment combinations that significantly alter the power curve. It's not a crafting system; it's a collection system with a paper-and-pencil dungeon crawl aesthetic: you explore, find items, and choose which to keep and which to give to secondary heroes. The accumulation of rare artifacts on main heroes is one of the vectors through which competitive advantage is consolidated in advanced games.

The management of multiple heroes introduces an organizational complexity reminiscent of campaign planning in classic wargames. Incorrect prioritization in the early turns is the type of mistake newcomers systematically make, and which is paid for in subsequent weeks when enemy armies have already grown. The learning curve is not vertical, but it requires 10 to 15 hours before faction-specific construction priorities become intuitive. The game's onboarding text handles this better than the genre average, but it cannot replace the direct experience of defeat.

The six factions present in the Early Access build are diversified not only aesthetically but structurally: each faction accesses unit pools with specific synergies, and the choice of which to develop influences the entire power curve. The vampires and liches of the Necropolis drain life and reanimate fallen, while conversely, the Temple units compensate with armor and direct attack capabilities.

The magic system is the least resolved point of the setup. Mage guilds, built in cities, unlock random spells per tier. Each hero must physically visit the guild to learn the spells available at that specific location. The result at the high tier is devastating: Armageddon deals 100 base damage, plus ten times the hero's magic power, to all units on the field, including allies. The magic power curve is real and can realistically change the tide of battle once acquired. 

Tech and Performance: Do you need a powerful PC to play it?

Olden Era is a turn-based strategy game, which places the discussion about performance on a radically different plane compared to an action title. The GPU is stressed during combat and in rendering the adventure map. On a configuration with an RTX 4060, the title runs with a safety margin that never shows its limits.

The user interface is primarily designed for standard proportions and tends to leave unoptimized side margins on ultrawide: a recurring problem in strategy games that support the format by viewport extension rather than by structural UI readjustment. The UI scaling is, along with the completeness of the campaign, the most urgent construction site we honestly feel compelled to point out.

Controller support was temporarily disabled at launch after causing conflicts with keyboard and mouse, and will be reintroduced as an experimental feature in a subsequent update. On desktop PC, this absence is irrelevant: mouse and keyboard are the natural means for a title that requires precise selections on layered panels. The note for those who want to play from the couch remains open.