Missing HoMM? Modern Strategy Epics to Play Now, and What’s on the Horizon
Today, I’ve decided to take stock of the Strategy RPGs that pay tribute to one of the most iconic video-game franchises ever: Heroes of Might and Magic.
Recently, we’ve witnessed an incredible resurgence of interest in this famed strategy series among developers, sparking the creation of several promising new games and culminating in the very recent announcement of an all-new installment in the Heroes of Might and Magic saga.
Thirty years have passed since Heroes of Might and Magic first marched onto our hard drives in 1995, giving turn‑based fantasy strategy a pop‑culture identity all its own.
It’s alchemy of hero‑led armies, week‑based growth cycles, and candy‑box faction towns proved so enduring that HoMM‑style skirmishes are still shorthand for an entire sub‑genre today, one where victories hinge as much on clever map‑routing and artefact hunting as on battlefield tactics.
Yet, for an entire decade after Might & Magic Heroes VII bowed out in 2015, that official banner lay dormant.
Ubisoft’s surprise reveal of Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, slated for Early Access in Q2 2025, has therefore landed with the weight of a homecoming: a prequel set on the long‑teased continent of Jadame, launching just in time for the series’ 30th anniversary.
In the interim, fans refused to let the magic fade. Horn of the Abyss, a community‑made expansion that has steadily grown since 2011, now adds entire towns, HD fixes, and fresh campaigns to Heroes III, keeping the classic alive for new hardware and esports‑style tournaments.
In the meantime, a new wave of HoMM‑likes has flourished, from Age of Wonders 4′s sprawling 4X‑hybrid realms to SpellForce: Conquest of Eo and even a lot of indie games, which are part of this article.
I’ve gathered all the latest releases that channel this style of game, as well as the in-development titles slated to launch in the near future.
Everything you should play if you love or loved Heroes of Might and Magic
I can’t kick off this roundup without spotlighting the game that, up until the brand-new HOMM chapter was announced (more on that later), stood as the series’ de facto spiritual successor.
I’m talking about Songs of Conquest, a strategy RPG that set out from day one to be a modern take on the classic formula strategy fans adore.
Created by Swedish studio Lavapotion and published by Coffee Stain, the game spent two years in Early Access before its full 1.0 release on PC in May 2024, followed by console and even mobile versions in the ensuing months.
It checks every box: you direct one or more heroes who roam the map gathering resources and capturing production sites, then pour those spoils into your towns to upgrade buildings, unlock beefier units, and gain new abilities.
Your heroes, called Wielders, are faction-aligned commanders, each with unique skills and synergies. You can send them into battles that keep the classic vibe: maneuver unit stacks on a tactical grid while your active hero slings tide-turning spells.
All told, Songs of Conquest delivers the full HOMM-like experience in a polished, modern wrapper, right down to that sweet mix of exploration, city-building, and spell-flinging tactical battles that hooked us in the first place.
The commercial response has been emphatic: the game sold over half a million copies in its first week out of Early Access in May 2024, and now it is a game I can easily recommend.
Where Songs leans on memory, Triumph Studios‘ Age of Wonders 4 stretches the old hero‑stack formula across a modern 4X canvas.
You found cities on a provincial lattice, annex neighbouring hexes for food, gold, and mana, and nudge foreign rulers through threats or treaties while your custom wizard king levels up on the front lines.
Under the hood, everything is driven by collectible Tomes of Magic: unlock a tome, research its spells, and your entire empire shape‑shifts, forests sprout where deserts once lay, or your mole-folk sprout angel wings for a decisive flanking charge, before the fight drops to a fully‑animated, initiative-based tactics map.
The game has received numerous DLC packs with a variety of content, but naturally, the spotlight is on the latest ones.
Giant Kings, released on April 1, 2025, lets players terraform realms as towering monarchs, and the upcoming Archon Prophecy, which arrives on August 12, 2025, features celestial factions and a prophecy-driven narrative layer.
A great choice is also SpellForce: Conquest of Eo, a turn-based 4X strategy and RPG hybrid developed by Owned by Gravity and published by THQ Nordic. It was released for PC in February 2023 and later on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Set in the fantasy world of Eo, players assume the role of a wizard expanding their tower, mastering one of three magical disciplines, Necromancy, Alchemy, or Artificing, while exploring a procedurally generated map filled with quests, rival mages, and tactical hex-based battles.
Featuring over 100 unit types, 80 handcrafted battle maps, and hundreds of quests, the game has grown through expansions like Demon Scourge, Weaver’s Realms, and Children of Nor, adding new factions, classes, and story content.
The developer also keeps a steady rhythm with its DLC releases, having rolled one out on February 13, 2024, called Demon Scourge, introducing demon mechanics and cultist content and a Troll faction that upended early‑game map control, and Children of Nor, released on May 14, 2025, adding Astromancers who craft star‑charts for empire‑wide buffs and more.
Another series is credited with truly shaping this genre, and after many years without a successor, it finally received a well-deserved sequel in 2021 courtesy of developer Fulqrum Games.
I’m talking about King’s Bounty II, which trades the overhead adventure map for a third‑person RPG camera that wanders Nostria’s rolling hills until combat snaps to hex‑grid tactics.
A major next-gen update on September 7, 2023, introduced dynamic 4K visuals and 60 fps performance for PS5 and Xbox Series players. However, reviews still highlight the steep learning curve and meager tutorials, echoing the late-’90s PC design that will sound familiar to veteran HoMM commanders.
Another long-running strategy series, launched back in 1999 on PC and receiving a sequel in 2021, is Disciples. Its latest entry, Liberation, is a perfect fit for this list.
The game from Frima Studio keeps exploration real‑time, enemy patrols will literally chase your heroine across the landscape, but every clash snaps to a fixed hex grid governed by an initiative bar.
While Liberation features the distinctive elements of the genre, its branching morality quests push the design toward narrative RPG territory.
The 2022 Paths to Madness expansion added eight dark‑fantasy side quests and new recruitable units but, crucially, left the core systems untouched.
Up next is a lineup of indie strategy RPGs that may not be well-known, but they’re genuinely significant for the genre.
One is Hero’s Hour, which takes HoMM’s town‑building and resource‑hoarding cadence, but when armies clash, the clock suddenly starts ticking. Exploration, recruitment, and castle upgrades all unfold in familiar, turn‑based turns on a procedurally generated overworld.
The moment you engage an enemy, however, the field fills with hundreds of pixel warriors who fight in accelerated real time while you lob cooldown‑based spells from the sidelines.
The resulting push-and-pull between leisurely grand-strategy planning and one-minute adrenaline spikes gives each session its tempo.
The twelve wildly asymmetric factions, amphibious sirens, and axolotl-folk who dominate the seas, as well as infernal cults with fiery passives and teleport tricks, keep the meta fresh across endlessly rerollable maps, definitely a game I can’t recommend enough.
Another relevant HoMM‑like is Clash II. In this not-so-famous strategy game, you guide a hero across the war‑torn continent of Karkhan, seizing resource sites and artefacts, then funneling the spoils into an expanding stronghold whose new buildings unlock higher‑tier troops and hero upgrades.
Battles play out as classic turn‑based tactical engagements on self‑contained arenas where careful positioning and timing matter.
At the same time, a light tech/skill tree lets commanders lean into direct‑damage sorcery or army‑wide buffs. Prime Bit Games has you choose a side in the central conflict and decide the fate of the land, an invitation to replay the campaign from the opposing perspective once you’ve seen one ending.
If you want another hidden gem, it is The Dragoness: Command of the Flame, which grafts a roguelite heartbeat onto the HoMM loop.
Each expedition across the shattered Drairthir Peninsula branches into skirmishes and events; win or lose, you return to the ruined capital of Níwenborh to invest in permanent buildings and upgrades before venturing out again.
Combat stays firmly turn‑based on compact, tactical grids where beastly recruits clash and you cast from six colour‑coded schools of magic. Because mission progress and units can reset between runs, your roster is partly expendable, encouraging bold plays and rapid army turnover rather than perfect preservation.
The result feels like a deck‑builder’s risk‑reward cycle transplanted into a strategy shell: short, intense forays feeding a longer quest to restore the Dragoness’s dominion.
Ultimately, the Master of Magic remake truly functions as a living museum piece. MuHa Games’ relaunch hit PC on 13 December 2022 and keeps the 1994 classic’s twin worlds intact, then broadened them with Scourge of the Seas on 8 February 2024, an expansion that adds oceanic landmarks like Treasure Islands and Wind Caves, plus four new sea‑centric wizards.
You conjure a wizard, pick spellbooks across the game’s classic schools of magic, and found settlements on Arcanus before breaching portals to the monster‑rich mirror realm of Myrror.
Each turn alternates between empire management, researching spells, forging artefacts, recruiting heroes, and hex‑based tactical battles where fantasy stacks clash beneath towering city walls.
The result is a deliberate, slow‑burn sandbox whose dizzying spell/race combinations keep every run delightfully unbalanced.
By preserving most of the old quirks while layering on modern DLC, the remake allows today’s designers to trace exactly which mechanics, wizard customization, spellbook schools, HoMM later streamlined, underlining that the sub-genre’s roots run deeper than a single series.
Most Anticipated HOMM-Like Strategy Games
So far, I’ve shown you everything that’s already playable. Now it’s time to spotlight a few titles still in development. Three of them are in Early Access, so you can dive in right away, and they’re already packed with content. Let’s start with those, and then I’ll share details on the others.
The first stop is Pennon and Battle, which arrived quietly last summer and already feels like a scrappy cousin to early Heroes installments. From a parchment‑styled world map, you guide feudal lords across Ruachland, capturing sawmills, gem mines, and arcane shrines whose trickle of resources feeds an ever‑growing stronghold network.
Encounters flip to compact tactical arenas where hero skills and more than sixty offense and support spells can tilt the odds for almost a hundred recruitable troop types; randomised blessing event cards spice up both exploration and combat runs.
Once you’ve wrapped the campaign, you can export your favourite unit mix straight into an online arena for bespoke PvP bouts, a modern flourish overlaying a very classical loop of expansion, city‑building, and weekly mustering. The game is available in Early Access on Steam.
Set light‑years away, Heroes of Science and Fiction re‑skins the HoMM formula as a planetary scramble among rival star‑faring species.
This game, which recently changed its name to be better associated with the HOMM series, features procedural planet surfaces that hide relic caches and rare alloys; haul them back to orbital bases that unlock new tech tiers and seven‑unit battlegroups for your decked‑out commanders.
Faction asymmetry is pronounced, a crystalline swarm fights nothing like the jet‑pack marines of the Terran Remnant, yet every skirmish still funnels into a clean, turn‑based grid where commander abilities and artefact load‑outs provide the fireworks.
Early‑access players already have four factions, two mini‑campaigns, and twenty‑plus skirmish maps to tinker with, and Oxymoron Games promises a Steam Workshop map editor before full launch. Next up, I’m pretty sure you’ve never even heard of this one.
It’s titled Broken Alliance, and its familiar hex crawl is fused with a light deck‑builder. You ally with one of four ideologically clashing realms on a world cracked by runaway magic, then roam story‑driven regions to pick quests, puzzle shrines, and champion recruits whose cards drop straight into a personal battle deck.
Hands of buffs, summons, and terrain tricks are played alongside positional tactics, giving every faction a druidic paradise, a techno‑forge, a zealous war‑cult, or the soon‑to‑arrive Phobos, its own combat cadence.
The pixel‑art presentation belies a design pedigree that includes veterans from Disco Elysium and earlier HoMM projects, and the January 2025 early‑access build has already begun a content‑patch rhythm aimed at expanding its branching narrative and card catalogue.
And now I have almost reached the end of this article with two unmissable games.
Slitherine‘s forthcoming Stormbinders, which layers dynamic weather onto the genre’s bedrock. A continent‑wide storm front constantly mutates both the strategic overworld and the hex battlefields, forcing you to reroute supply lines or brace for lightning‑charged terrain that can fry entire formations.
Between tempests, you ride a chosen hero across a free‑roaming realm map, gather resources, and invest them in classic castle screens that unlock faction‑specific rosters, over seventy units per realm, according to the latest dev diary.
Because storm patterns are re‑rolled every campaign, no two conquests (or tactical set‑pieces) play out the same, giving a fresh edge to otherwise traditional turn‑based sieges and spell‑slinging duels. I’m really curious to see how it turns out.
Finally, just like you’d save the best, most mouth-watering bite for last, that’s exactly what I’ve done with this article.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, the first main‑line entry since 2015, positions itself as both prequel and homecoming.
Developed by Unfrozen (Iratus Lord of the Dead) with Ubisoft and Hooded Horse, the game revisits the continent’s early fracturing, offering six playable factions that range from crusading knight orders to desert djinn dynasties.
Core systems remain unmistakably HoMM: week-based troop growth, artifact-laden heroes, and a resource-rich adventure map navigable solo, cooperatively, or in head-to-head multiplayer.
What’s new is a non‑linear campaign structure and deeper role‑playing layers, branching hero talent trees, and story choices meant to echo the moral forks of modern RPGs.
With a launch window set for Q2 2025, Olden Era aims to prove that the series can still move forward without derailing the mile-wide, turn-based groove it created three decades ago. Here you can find more details about it.
Below, you can find all the games mentioned in the list, along with their release dates and platforms. Now it’s time to let me know what you think about this list and if there’s anything I should add. Wish you the best. Ciao
- Songs of Conquest – PC (Windows/macOS) May 20, 2024; PS5 & Xbox Series X|S November 12, 2024; Android & iOS March 13, 2025.
- Disciples: Liberation – PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One – October 21, 2021.
- SpellForce: Conquest of Eo – PC February 3, 2023; PS5 & Xbox Series X|S November 7, 2023.
- Age of Wonders 4 – PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S – May 2, 2023.
- King’s Bounty II – PC, PS4, Xbox One & Switch August 24, 2021; PS5 & Xbox Series versions September 7, 2023.
- Hero’s Hour – PC (Steam) March 1, 2022.
- Clash II – PC (Windows) February 15, 2024.
- The Dragoness: Command of the Flame – PC September 1, 2022; PS5/PS4/Xbox Series X|S/Switch August 10, 2023.
- Master of Magic (remake) – PC (Windows) December 13, 2022.
- Pennon and Battle – PC (Windows) Early Access July 18, 2024.
- Heroes of Science and Fiction – PC (Windows) Early Access September 30, 2024.
- Broken Alliance – PC (Windows) Early Access January 15, 2025.
- Stormbinders – PC (Windows); release date TBA / Coming soon.
- Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era – PC (Windows via Steam) Early Access in 2025.
