Songs of Conquest is a turn-based strategy RPG that wears its Heroes of Might and Magic lineage openly and without apology. You command Wielders, powerful hero-like figures who channel magical energy called Essence, and you build armies of fantastical units to conquer hex-based maps across four distinct campaigns. If you have any nostalgia for late-90s strategy RPGs, Lavapotion has essentially reconstructed that feeling from the ground up, then quietly added enough mechanical depth to make the old formula feel fresh again. The combat system is where Songs of Conquest earns its reputation. Spell construction revolves around managing Essence types, each tied to the units in your army, and the interplay between your unit composition and what spells you can actually cast is genuinely clever. You are not just stacking the biggest numbers. You are making decisions about troop variety that directly shape your magical toolkit in battle. Build a pure undead stack and your Essence generation skews dark, locking you into a specific spell palette. Mix in some nature units and suddenly you have options. It rewards experimentation in a way that holds up well past the early hours, and yes, past hour 40 it still presents real choices rather than a solved meta. The four campaigns each follow a different faction with distinct writing tones. None of it reaches the literary heights of the genre's narrative royalty, but the worldbuilding is consistent and the lore has genuine texture. There are some filler-adjacent objectives scattered through the longer campaign maps, and a few missions drag when the map design prioritizes territory sprawl over interesting decisions. Those are real complaints. The AI on lower difficulties is also a little too passive, which can make solo campaigns feel less threatening than the map scale implies. Multiplayer and the skirmish maps tighten everything up considerably. Visually, the pixel art is exceptional. Not in a retro-for-retro's-sake way, but in a way that makes every unit animation and environmental detail feel intentional. The world map traversal, the animated battle scenes, the subtle weather effects across campaign maps, all of it coheres into something that looks handcrafted rather than procedurally assembled. The soundtrack matches that care, with compositions that avoid the generic fantasy fanfare trap and actually set regional and factional moods. Who is this for? Primarily, strategy RPG fans who want a meaningful resource-and-combat loop without a live-service layer underneath it. If you have ever spent an evening calculating optimal hero pathing on an HoMM3 map, you will be comfortable here within minutes. If you are coming from pure RPGs and lighter on strategy experience, the mechanical density of Essence management and army upkeep might take a few maps to click. But it does click, and when it does the campaign maps open up in satisfying ways. Songs of Conquest is not trying to reinvent the genre. It is trying to be an excellent version of a genre that went quiet for too long, and by that measure it largely succeeds. Monika, Scout Team