Three Heroes

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were built by people who love their own culture more than they love game-design conventions, and Three Heroes lands squarely in that category. It is a third-person action-RPG rooted in Russian fairy-tale tradition, following three bogatyrs - Ilya, Dobrynya, and Alesha - each carrying their own weapon set and skill tree through eleven hand-crafted missions set against a colorful, cell-shaded Slavic world. The core conceit is genuinely appealing: you hot-swap between the three heroes at any time (F1, F2, F3 by default), position your bench with a single keypress, and build each fighter's kit independently through an EXP-and-skill-point system where every move can be upgraded to three tiers. When it clicks, coordinating a staff-vault from Dobrynya, a sword charge from Ilya, and a ranged suppression line from Alesha feels like a small tactical puzzle with a satisfying payoff. The problems are real and worth naming plainly. Alesha's bow mechanics are deeply unreliable at range, with hitboxes that refuse to cooperate even when the game hands you a targeting skill specifically to fix them. The English localization sits somewhere between endearing and confusing - voice acting is rough, and exposition sometimes buries the actual mission objective inside a monologue you have already tuned out. Most critically, the game does not autosave. If one of your three heroes dies it is game over, and if you forgot to hit Escape and manually save after your last quest, you are replaying ground you already cleared. That single design choice has cost the game more goodwill than anything else. What keeps it from being a write-off is the atmosphere and the physics. The soundtrack is genuinely bombastic in the right moments and hushed when the world opens up between encounters - it does real work. The cell-shaded art pops with the kind of committed color palette you rarely see in low-budget titles. And the physics engine, apparently half-intentionally chaotic, produces moments of slapstick joy - flinging enemies into scenery and watching Dobrynya rag-doll across a hillside after a maxed-out pole-vault never fully gets old. There is also one mission, a villager-escort sequence where your charges grow increasingly reckless and fast as you clear the road ahead, that shows real design imagination and proves the team had more ideas than the budget let them execute cleanly. Three Heroes sits at a mixed 69% on Steam across nearly 900 reviews, and that split feels accurate rather than unfair. It is not a polished game. It is a short one too - eleven missions, completable in roughly eight to ten hours with side content. For players drawn to obscure folklore settings, character-swap tactics, or who simply enjoy rooting for games that clearly punched above their weight, the rough edges are part of the texture. For anyone with a low tolerance for manual saves, wobbly localization, and aiming that requires some faith, this will frustrate more than it delights. Go in with calibrated expectations, save obsessively, and there is something genuinely warm here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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