Starving Heroes of Might & Magic fans finally eat as spiritual successor Songs of Conquest leaves its 2-year early access behind

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Songs of Conquest, the really quite good and really quite pretty Heroes of Might & Magic-like that first hit early access in 2022, has reached its final form. Well, kind of. The game has finally left early access for the sunlit uplands of a 1.0 release, but the devs promise more development to come: "This is merely the beginning of a new chapter in our epic saga," they say.

If you're not familiar, Songs of Conquest is a tactics game in the classic vein of stuff like Heroes of Might & Magic 3. You pick a faction and guide heroes around a sprawling world map, capturing resources, battling armies on a hex-based grid, and generally doing all you can to crush your enemies. At the same time, you have to defend your home base and guide it up a ladder of production from 'dinky hamlet that spits out the occasional pikeman' to 'dread factory of war'.

It's a good time, especially given the striking absence of HoMM-likes on the modern videogame market, and it earned the much-sought approval of PCG's own strategy czar Fraser Brown in its early access form. With the 1.0 release comes a new campaign that will "conclude the epic adventure that began with the Baronies of Arleon fighting for power, the rise of the Rana to reclaim the Marsh, and the loyalist of Loth determined to bring back a dead Empress."

All of which sounds quite urgent, and I'm eager to leap into the game's 1.0 release and put a stop to these dead-Empress-returners myself. After all, despite the enduring popularity of the HoMM series (or at least its older entries), it feels like a format that studios find devilishly hard to nail down.

Heck, even the HD version of HoMM 3—something that ought to have been a slam-dunk—ended up just feeling like a low-fat version of the original game thanks to some crucial missing expansions. Having a good, modern 'one of these' out there and getting active development love seems like a treat too good to pass up.

If you fancy giving the game a go in its full-release form, you can find it on Steam, GOG, and Epic.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.