Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era will release in PC early access on April 30th, Hooded Horse and Ubisoft have announced. The new strategy RPG from developers Unfrozen is the first freshly baked HOMM game in over a decade, and will launch with a mixture of familiar and new modes, spanning singleplayer and multiplayer.

If you're new to the series – there is the faint but horrifying possibility that you were not yet born, when the last one came out - it's a turn-based affair with procedurally generated maps, where you alternate between tending to your towns and sending heroes, fantasy beasties and armies on quests.

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There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or, so the saying goes, but I'm pretty sure the ham sandwich I had at my friend's house when I was seven didn't cost me a penny. Still, in Crown of Greed, a fantasy real-time strategy game inspired by the likes of Majesty, the old adage certainly holds true. And with its release today, it can even be put into the test!

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There is a tiny wild sun trapped inside my crystal tower. I hear its garbled voice and catch the yellow of its fire through the blinding white blocks of the summit. The tower itself is so bright on the outside you can barely identify objects placed on it, but I have smashed the crust and dug a network of passages, and it’s shadier within. A realm of shining fog, slick as tooth enamel, with fissured, fugitive reflections that call to mind the beautiful quartz spacecraft in Noctis.

The relative gloom inside the tower implies that the structure’s external radiance is also a reflection. It appears to be caught in the glare of some celestial body, but if such a body exists, it emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, discernable only from its impact on other bodies. The skies of Lucid Blocks are dark and cloudy even by day, inasmuch as ‘day’ means anything in the game. There is one major astral feature, a hazy torus that neither rises nor sets, luminous enough to orient by when exploring the game's procedurally generated landscapes, but not enough to actually light your steps after dark. The only real sun here is the one below. The one I crafted. It slurs and shouts, nosing the walls of its prison.

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There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.

I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.

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In ZIPIT's splendid story-driven photography sim The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish, you are a young witch living on the back of a huge, aerial catfish – a benevolent flying island of trees, fountains and windchimes that puts me in mind of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

The catfish is sad that the skies are so empty nowadays, so you must use a magic flute - see, we're definitely in Zelda's orbit - to transform into a similarly gravity-agnostic eel, which eats clouds and poops them out as various creatures. Snapping photos of those creatures grants you seashells, which turn into more clouds when thrown into the fountain.

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I am shocked to discover that this is the first time we've written about Amberspire, the new sci-fi city builder from Nic Tringali, developer of starfaring monastic strategy game The Banished Vault. Shocked, I tell you!

It's set on a gas giant moon, looks a bit like isometric Sable, features dice with arcane symbols, and challenges you to "cohabit" with an ecology of ooze, silica and rust, rather than turning everything into a mall. It's the kind of speculative fiction racket an eco-vibing hipster like myself goes crackers over, and here I am announcing Amberspire to you with the release barely a month away on 6th May. I can only hang my head in shame, and offer you this trailer.

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It takes a lot to get me interested in anything tower-defensive these days, and I'm getting pretty grouchy about paper-based aesthetics, too, but "minimalist strategy game" Painted Kingdoms combines these trends to promising effect. It takes place in a living book, where each chapter is illustrated according to a different cultural heritage, extending from Europe to China.

As a roving general-hero, your job is to build a settlement by filling in the blank pages with your magic brush, giving rise to both fortifications and lovely wild spaces. Then, you must fight off waves of badniks who threaten to set the paper alight, reducing your pop-up terrain to ash.

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Sintopia, the very Bullfroggy strategy management game from developers Piraknights and publishers Team 17, will release on April 16th. I compared this one to The Screwtape Letters back at announcement, but the more obvious, gamer-brain pitch is that it's Black & White sitting on top of Dungeon Keeper. That is, a god sim parked on top of a management game, albeit with a greater emphasis on automation than you might recall from Bullfrog's heyday.

In Sintopia, you are the middle manager of Hell. Above you, there is a bucolic, self-sufficient realm of weirdly plant-based humans, all going about their lives farming, building and searching for treasure. And sinning. The Humus (Humusians? Humusings?) do love to sin. Which is where you come in. When the Humus die, they are swept away to the underworld by a toothy hellbus, and must be purged of moral stains before they can be safely granted a new body.

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Get in the videogame, loser, it's time to break into an "impossible palace", stab insect gardeners with your saber, and rescue your mother from some bastard prince. Out today, Journey Of The Garden Rose is the latest "old school 3D action-adventure" from Renegade Sector, a developer whose affection for pulp beams forth from every pixel.

Look at the blue tiles, pink pillars and sockety murals of that courtyard. Look at that grass - more like verdigris than vegetation. Look at the delightful tarantulas loitering in the low-poly orchards. Ugh, why don't I have a palace that looks a bit like a vintage four-colour horror comic. Why am I cursed to live in this world, with its vast plenitude of colours that all muddle together without contrast. Please, watch the trailer while I grieve.

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The spring content patch for Lord of the Rings Online is shaping up to be both cheerful and ambitious. Update 48: A Glorious Hunt went up on the Bullroarer test server this week with the new Rivendell housing zone, support for UI scaling in plugins, and the final Umbar zone, Pahar Hatokáli. Rivendell Steadings is […]

With the war prep concluded, Massively OP’s MJ is heading to the front lines to meet up with Rytlock and Faren in Guild Wars 2. Scarabs must be smashed! And who better to face this pestilence than MJ, who is very brave. After all, the quest itself declares I’m Brave, You Know. Then it’s on […]

If you’ve tried to go back to Final Fantasy XI at any point or even tried to start the game completely new… well, you know it’s not an easy thing to do. The game has a tutorial quest, but it hasn’t been updated in years, and that’s without dealing with things like maps being expensive. So […]

Where my Paladins at? You’re next up for Pantheon Rise of the Fallen’s series of class refresh dev blogs, and Visionary Realms is hopeful you’ll like what you see. The new Pally is still basically a tank or healer who deals with the Wrath combat resource, and Pallies will still be able to spec into […]

Justin and Bree discuss EverQuest Legends, Camelot Unchained New World, V Rising, Loftia, and Elder Scrolls Blades, with adventures in World of Warcraft, Marvel Snap, and Marvel Heroes.

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It’s time for Mortal Online 2 to discuss things that are coming in THE FUTURE. Flying cars! Linoleum countertops! Double ovens in the wall! OK, so maybe not all of that is coming to the PvP sandbox, but there are new developments to talk about all the same. First off, the results from player polling about the […]

Albion Online players are probably pretty familiar with the Rites of Spring seasonal event that happens every year. What they’re perhaps not familiar with, however, is that this year’s event features something truly important. Truly magical. Truly springlike. A giatn bunny mount. Yes, the seasonal event will once again see colorful eggs sprout all across the […]

I’ve spent a few hours over the course of this past month with Where Winds Meet, and I still cannot tell you how I really feel about that time with the game all that much. Or at least not with any level of great confidence. That’s not to suggest I’m passing final judgment (this is […]

Regular fans of World of Warcraft are probably familiar with the annual Running of the Trolls, a community-led charity event that both celebrates Pride month and helps to raise money for The Trevor Project. Well, it looks like the 2026 version is getting official backing from Blizzard, as it’s being made an in-game event in patch […]

As promised, RuneScape Dragonwilds’ 0.11 patch has entered the survival sandbox’s early access chat today, bearing the uncomfortable name Dowdun Reach, which either sounds like “dowdy” or reminds me of Downton Abbey every single time I see it. The patch itself is anything but dowdy, however, as players are looking at new quests, new building […]