Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Horn of the Abyss Review

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is a game I love very much and have already reviewed here if you’re interested. Horn of the Abyss is a fan made mod for the game made by the community. It is made with such quality that it is genuinely comparable the game’s official expansions Armageddon’s Blade and Shadow of Death. In fact, so true is this that when the music composer for the mod, Docent Picolan, unfortunately passed away during development… Paul Anthony Romero, the official and original composer for the Heroes of Might and Magic Games, stepped in to help finish up.

It is so adored by the Heroes 3 community that, when I got into the game and asked which version of it is best, they all said the Complete Edition with the Horn of the Abyss mod. Notice that if you try to play the Complete Edition or HD edition – both of which are the game’s official releases – online, you’ll notice there are NO online lobbies. However, if you load up Horn of the Abyss you’ll see pages of people still playing this game online like it’s the 90’s and it just got released.

The Horn of the Abyss mod is totally free, aside from needing to own the Complete Edition (not to be confused with the HD Edition) of Heroes 3 to play it. But it’s clear people are giving them money, since maintaining servers isn’t cheap and they do it by accepting donations from the community.

It’s a mod so damn good and trusted people will give the developers money so they can keep playing their favourite 90’s game online with their friends. I think that’s really admirable. So, I’m going to be reviewing this as though it were official DLC for Heroes 3 because to treat it as less would be underselling it.

But What’s In Horn of the Abyss?

It’s not just a multiplayer mod. It comes with two new towns, a new campaign, and dozens of single scenarios to match. Let’s start with towns:

The first town is the Cove. Its a pirate themed town with some excellent themed music that I can’t stop humming. The units consist of a couple of sea monsters like Nymphs and Sea Serpents combined with humans like lowly Crewmen with scimitars, and Sea Dogs with flintlocks.

The units and town are all well implimented and feel like they’d always been apart of the game. What Horn of the Abyss understands is not everything has to be flashy. Some units are there just to be fodder, and some just to fill up your Castle when the enemy inevitably comes for it. And it is the units that stand out among them – your Sea Dogs, Sea Witches and Nix, that you really want to be taking into war, and who are unique. And it’s that sort of quality control and restraint that lends the mod a professional feel.

Sea Dogs are unique because they upgrade twice, whereas every other unit in the game only upgrades once. So you turn your mediocre range unit into a reliable ranged unit, and then into an extremely good ranged unit. Sea Witches are fun because they’re sort of a mirror to what Monks are for the Castle town, but with the addition of adding a negative status affect to enemies they target.

The only thing that does seem *ahem* unbalanced about Cove are the Heroes. One starts with Clone as a specialty. While not wothout counters, Clone is a great spell as is, but having it from the start of the game feels like you opened cheat mode. What if you had 10 Sea Dogs and decided you wanted 30 instead? Well now you can from the offset, provided you bump up your Knowledge stat. Another specialises in Cannons, which is a new siege engine comparable to the ballista in the base game. The key difference is that ballista’s are only really worthwhile if you invest in both the Artillery and Offence skills, but Cannons are generally better than Ballista’s even without these things, and can also target walls like the catapult can. Oh, and this particular hero (along with 5 others in the Cove) start with Offence by default. Offence, of course, being a universally good stat for any hero to get.

Are these criticisms? Well, no. Heroes 3 is bonkers unbalanced as it is and that’s why it is fun. The game is won or lost depending on your ability to stretch it’s systems. You ain’t defeating a player who has expert Town Portal, who is thus able to defend every town on the map simultaneously, unless you have expert dimension door, which will allow you to do five turns of travel in one turn. So, broken as these heroes are, their roster and the larger Heroes 3 sandbox balances them enough. They’re not unbeatable, and still need to play into the strength of their units in order to pull off the ludicrous tactics Heroes 3 is known for.

On new years day 2024 they released a second new town to the mod called Factory. It is very loosely based on the Factory town that the original, official developers intended to put into the game, but was cut due to fan backlash: The original was to be a technological sci-fi faction based on the alien elements of the primary Might and Magic franchise. Because, in this franchise, Devils are aliens from another world and Angels are synthetic robots designed to counter them. I once read the lore of Might and Magic on a wiki, and the endgame to more than one of those games involves getting an alien laser gun and blowing up a spaceship. But I digress: Given that Heroes 3 leaned more on the fantasy side of the setting than the sci-fi, fans pushed back against the original Factory town and thus we got Conflux instead in the Armageddon’s Blade Expansion. Unable to put another town together for the next DLC, Shadow of Death became a prequel to the Restoration of Erathia campaign.

Horn of the Abyss re-imagines the Factory town as something less alien, but still technology based. It is a mish-mash of exiles from the other factions coming together to tame nature and dominate it with machines. Your tier one unit is a lowly halfling which, when upgraded, goes from throwing stones to throwing bombs. Your tier 2 unit is a mechanic who can repair robotic units. Then you have a choice between taming nature, which gets you units like Armadillos and Sandworms, or going full techno to get Automatons and Juggernauts. If a game goes long enough and you pool your resources you can, of course, go down both routes of the unit upgrades.

The faction also comes with two tier 7 units, balanced by both requiring different build orders to get to. One is the Coatl, requiring a focus on the nature side of the faction, and the other is a Juggernaut that requires focus on technology.

On paper a lot of Factory units look a lot less good that Cove, but each has a unique special ability that gives them more situational utility than any other faction. Automotons, for example, can explode on death. So you can start the game as an Automoton specialist, split the unit into multiple stacks of one, cast haste on them, and charge them headlong into enemies as suicide bombers. It’s real useful in the early game to clear out neutral creatures, and also good for baiting out retaliation attacks from more valuable enemy units.

Bounty Hunters are another unit with a unique skill. They are a tier 6 range unit with low health but high damage output. Their special ability is that they can retaliate against range attacks by quick drawing a revolver to shoot back with. If you can defend a stack or two of these guys in melee, you can also be sure they’ll defend themselves against enemy range.

Campaign And Scenarios

Let’s start with campaigns because I don’t like them. Don’t get me wrong, the maps are very fine tuned, high quality and well play tested, but just aren’t for me. In the spirit of full disclosure, the only base game campaign I completed was Shaodow of Death because it was the only one I really liked, so this is more a personal thing than something that is wrong with the mod. What is noticably different in these new campaigns, however, is the balance. They are designed in such a way that you need to know the ins and outs of the game’s meta to get through them. The Cove Campaigns aren’t quite so bad, and I liked the first few levels of the Jolly Roger missions as you build up a cove after being stranded on an island. But I spent 30 minutes playing the first level of the Factory campaign and couldn’t get past day 5. To my mind there’s a line between the fair challenge and the need to play perfectly, which is what it feels the Factory campaign was going for.

Will I give it another go? Probably. Does that mean I necessarily want to? No. I just like feeling like I gave things a fair chance, you know? After all, even if it’s not my cup of tea, it is someone elses – There’s a lot of content and story here that’s genuinely cared for, about which my only critique is some of the English translation, since this mod was made by a rag tag team of Heroes-committed Russians.

Thankfully, the single scenarios added to the game are much more bearable. There’s a large number of them which are on par with the same sort of gameplay you’d expect from the base game maps. A notable inclusion is of maps larger than Extra Large. Now you’ve got Huge, Extra Huge, and Giant. There are only a handful of maps for these new sizes and that’s probably for the best, given how comically big they can be to the point of you feeling near insignificant when you see your starting visibility on the mini map. The maps are a mix of clearly being designed with the new towns in mind, and ones that integrate the already existing game content very well.

Other Changes and Additions

Horn of the Abyss also makes some balance changes to the game which, while not deal breakers, can signify a very slight turn away from the original vision of the game.

One of these things is spell research. This means that you can spend resources to replace a spell in your mages guild with another random spell, the cost of doing so increasing depending on what tier of spell you wish to swap. As of the latest patch you are guaranteed to get Town Portal if you do three researches of a tier 4 spell and fail to get it before then.

It’s a fun concept, but the idea of everyone being guaranteed to get Town Portal no matter what doesn’t sit well with me. It’s a ludicrously overpowered spell that trivialises the game, and the anticipation of working to get it is almost as fun as finally learning it. This research mechanic removes that bit of tension from the game and, in fairness, feels arbitrary. Similarly powerful overworld spells like Dimension Door and Fly – two of the only spells thar might let you counter an opponent using Town Portal – are not guaranteed to appear after so many researches, for example. It’s not that I don’t like Town Portal – I bloody love it – but it’s special because you work for it, not because you fork up enough resources until it arrives.

And it’s not as though Town Portal is all that rare. Every town with access to Level 4 mages guilds can have it spawn for their heroes, it can drop in the Tome of Earth Magic artifact, in overworld shrines, and owning multiple Inferno towns can allow you access to a nerfed version of the spell via the unique Castle Gate buildings, which allow any visiting hero to travel between other Infernos. Then, as I say, there are other overworld traversal spells that can serve the same purpose: You can travel five days in any direction in a single turn if you have the mana to spam Dimension Door, for instance. Or artifacts like Angel Wings and Boots of Levitation allow you to traverse impossible terrain without spells.

Another arbitrary change is the necromancy debuff. Methods of buffing necromancy, such as the necromancy amplifier building in the Necropolis, have mostly been cut in half from 10% to 5%. The necromancy skill itself, and a couple of related minor artifacts, have met the same fate. To me this undermines the Necropolis: They are supposed to play the long game, giving opponents easy access to beat them in the early game, but having a much harder time if they allow the Necropolis player to breathe. More than that, necromancy is so busted in Heroes 3 as it is that even cutting some of these benefits in half doesn’t change too much about the game, which makes it feel even more arbitrary for me. If you’re playing a large map and don’t spawn near the Necropolis player, that guy is still going to have a skeleton bonk-stack regardless of a 5% debuff to his skill.

If you farm neutral creatures for skeletons then, sure, you’ll see a marginally slower growth in your skeleton stack than otherwise, but winning a massive battle against a computer or human opponent will still net you hundreds of them, and likely let you break even after the fight. And the fact it’s still possible to just assemble the Cloak of the Undead King as easily as it was in the base game further negates the change.

To be clear, it isn’t a bad change. How can it be when it affects the game on such a minor level you’ll only notice at the start of any given scenario? But it is odd it was made at all.

Logistics, a skill granting additional movement points has been hit hard too. I can sort of understand this one, because a logistics hero in the base game could feel truly uncatchable, even if they weren’t combining their mkvement points with traversal spells. I’m mixed on this as it does make the Pathfinding skill more viable, but also negates the fun of starting with a hero who specialises in it and clearing your starting zone in record time. Additionally, the Intelligence skill grants less additional mana than it did before. The change to Intelligence feels like the necromancy debuff though, in that having expert Intelligence will still net you more mana than you’ll ever realistically need, which was the case both before and after the changes made to it.

Resistance, which had increased the magic resistence of units and had a chance to negate spell effects, is now just gone. Not only can you no longer acquire it unless via a witch hut or university, but even artifacts that used to provide magic resistance have been altered to provide bonuses to the Interference skill. Interference is new in Horn of the Abyss and decreases the willpower of the opposing hero you fight in battle. It’s a good skill and has utility, but it doesn’t have to be a replacement for Resistance. The absence of Resistance feels less like a balance change and more like the developers just didn’t like it. I miss it, if no one else does.

Worry not, not all the miscellaneous changes are weirdly arbitrary! I like that effort went into trying to encourage the use of skills normally passed on 99% of the time.

The Estates skill got a buff, meaning those side heroes that passively generate money are, while still not garnering you a fortune, at least getting you more than what Oliver Twist had to live on. Mysticism is now viable because it increases your mana regeneration to double digit numbers instead of a measly 4 at expert level. Then there’s Scouting, which has had the extra vision it provides increased so that you can see more than just five feet beyond what anyone without Scouting could see. It’s still not a great skill, but it’s better. First Aid has had the biggest bump, with the minimum amount of health it heals significantly raised to prevent 1hp heals at expert level. It does feel like it could be viable on smaller maps, where previously I’d have avoided it like the plague.

Reading all this, where I find I come into conflict with Horn of the Abyss is in these changes. Even the good ones. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has always been a game about breaking the sandbox: Deploying your game-breaking strategy against the enemy’s and seeing whose was most viable. It seems so pointless to balance the game so finely as this mod tries to, because all that balance achieves is delaying the inevitable. Sure, first aid might be better but no one’s choosing it over anything else… except eagle eye. Everyone hates eagle ete.

The point in nerfing necromancy so that heroes cannot build a large skeleton stack as quickly as they used to, necessitating the use of proper logistics for Necropolis players is contradicted by making Town Portal easier to access, so that the player can more frequently get their natural skeletons from home and on the field anyway, for example. It just seems some of the changes made in the name of balance are undermined by the core of Heroes 3.

Conclusion

So consumed have I been with content, I have forgotten some of the more finer work done in this mod, such as the brilliant art and animations. Additionally, they even got new 3D cutscenes for the campaigns, in the style of those included in the original game. I know nothing about how they created this or how to do so myself, but what I can say is that it’s glorious and so well fitting with the rest of Heroes 3. I used to try making stick figure animations as a kid and that was difficult, so kudos to everyone on this team. I have put together a mini test fight that I recorded just to show you the units in action. The video is below. I’ll cycle through animation speeds in it so you can see how well they’re done.

I know that’s not a great battle. I threw it together in the map editor just to better show off the units and how they interact. I hope you agree that the work done in this mod speaks for itself: It is of a professional standard, despite having been made with no obligation to meet a professional standard.

As for the rest of the game, balance is important. If every unit in the new towns, Cove and Factory, outperformed everything else in every regard, the whole game would lose identity, for example. I just don’t agree with a couple of the skill adjustments. That’s not bad, to be clear. It’s just not my preference. And, as I say, that Heroes ludicrousness occurs anyway in spite of these things because there is no stopping it.

I really enjoy Horn of the Abyss. The new content it adds in terms of maps and towns are brilliant and feel as though they were integrated by professional game developers. If this mod were in fact a DLC made by the original team, I’d sure as hell be willing to pay for it. It’s for this reason I have reviewed the mod as though it were such a DLC – It’s truly worthy of being considered a spiritual extension of what Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was.

It’s a free mod made by people who love that game and which builds on it in many ways, not just by expanding on its ideas, but by also having the bravery to do something new with itself. And I suppose that’s why it is so good. As great as Horn of the Abyss is as an extension of Heroes 3, it’s developers are also unaffraid of leaving a little of themselves imprinted on the game.

So yes, I would recommend Horn of the Abyss. It’s free, so there’s no reason not to check it out! And if you don’t like it, just disable the mkd and keep playing the base game. Easy as pie.

I’ll link to the mod page and installation instructions below:

https://heroes3wog.net/horn-of-the-abyss/