Disciples III - Resurrection

I keep a mental shortlist of strategy games that had real potential and fumbled it, and Disciples III: Resurrection sits near the top of that list. On paper, this is exactly the kind of hex-grid, army-building TBS I want more of: you lead the Undead Hordes across the world of Nevendaar, commanding heroes like Salaar and Amina through a campaign-driven single-player experience that mixes overworld exploration with positional turn-based combat. The unit roster is genuinely interesting, with over 50 new creatures for the undead faction, individually levelled rather than mass-produced from a barracks. That detail alone, levelling each werewolf, lich, and wyvern as a named asset rather than a throwaway soldier, is the kind of design decision that makes a strategy game feel like it has stakes. The combat system introduced a revised initiative mechanic where high-initiative units can act multiple times per round, and a cover point system where positioning a knight near enemy mages traps them and forces an engagement. On paper that sounds layered. In practice, the initiative numbers are so poorly balanced that the undead faction's low-initiative units routinely face enemies who act two or three times for every single action your squad takes, and this is on Normal difficulty. The campaign difficulty swings wildly: stretches that are trivially easy alternate with encounters that wall you completely unless you happen to have recruited a werewolf or are willing to spam global spells. There is no comfortable middle ground, and the tutorial, a set of static screens with short videos, does almost nothing to explain how the initiative ratios or the cover system actually interact in practice. The AI quality is another sore spot for anyone who cares about late-game decision-making. The overworld AI opponents do not meaningfully exploit the zone-of-control and hex-positioning tools the game gives them, which hollows out the mid-campaign entirely. Outside the main campaign you get only two skirmish maps where the undead faction is playable, and hotseat-only multiplayer with no online component. For a game with a 70-hour advertised runtime, the actual content envelope is surprisingly thin once you account for padding from slow movement animations. Players who accelerate those animations report completing the campaign in roughly half the advertised time. The gothic art direction and ambient soundtrack are genuine bright spots, the unit animations hold up, and the atmosphere suits the Mortis-led undead lore well enough to keep a patient player engaged through the story. But the English voice acting is so uniformly poor that multiple reviewers across different outlets independently recommended muting it and reading the dialogue instead. For series veterans or hardcore TBS players who want something that fights back, Resurrection does deliver punishment. The army customisation, rune system, potions, and situational item choices mean there is no single dominant build path, which I respect. But newcomers will find an interface that obscures basic information, a story that assumes you remember Renaissance's plot in detail, and difficulty spikes that read more like unfinished balance than intentional design. Developer Akella no longer exists, so there will be no patches, no mod toolkit support of note, and no community fixes to lean on.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Disciples III - Resurrection.