Songs of Conquest’s Captain Xavier Silkspool (incredible fantasy name) starts and finishes as a boss tutorial for Cecelia Stoutheart, your first major campaign hero. He shows you around the game’s gorgeous 3D pixel art maps, actively pursuing you and claiming resources, monuments, and territory (at least compared to the more static clumps of enemies you’ve faced so far). When you meet him in battle, you’ll realize how important your personal magic spells are. In Cecelia’s hymn of conquest, her combat with Silkspool is likely a rhyming couplet. He died quickly, and she’ll fight many more to restore her nation.
The cunning spool is hard to unspin. The fourth tale was introduced to Songs of Conquest 1.0, and Captain Xavier appears in various forms throughout its four campaigns. Frog-like Rana see him as their liberator and buddy. To Baron Aldus, a destitute servant of the Stouthearts and landlord to the Baryan merchants, he’s a trusted intermediary with the Unseen Society’s seductive necromancers. Bihgli Satherdown, an elderly Baryan tinkersmith, considers him his lord and master, a debtholder whose oath must be kept even in death. Silkspool may not be the focus of any Songs of Conquest campaign, but he’s one of several background players whose ever-changing heroics and villainies add depth and richness to this sprawling, tactical tapestry.
The greatest of its anthological narrative evokes Fire Emblem Fates’ split campaigns and Three Houses’ three conflicting, Sliding Doors-style pathways. Lavapotion’s four campaigns are only four missions long, but as these surprisingly lengthy tales unfold, you care and root for whichever faction you’re currently controlling, even if they’re fighting a clan you fought hours earlier to win.
Starting with its extensive overworld maps. Each campaign centers on one of its four major factions and one of its Wielders, who functions as your avatar throughout the primary exploration phase and as your army’s magic-casting commander on the battlefield. Most missions have the same goal: wipe out all opposition troops and don’t let your primary Wielder die in combat. You’ll eventually get extra Wielders to help you drive back the fog of war, seize villages, and give the enemy AI severe looks as they circle your protective city walls. Otherwise, it’s a fast retreat back to the loading screen, where you best hope you have a solid auto- or quick-save option (god bless F5), since some missions might exceed two hours while pursuing foes throughout its enormous areas.
Most missions are fast-paced and full of hidden gems. Songs of Conquest, like its modernized Heroes of Might and Magic game, is a two-parter. You’ll mostly traverse the landscape top-down, bouncing between its many shiny curios, grabbing loose bundles of resources, and claiming mines, farms, EXP, and stat-boosting monuments like a battle-ready magpie. You’ll need as many of these as possible to battle the many Silkspool-level enemies you’ll encounter in each campaign, so following these shimmering breadcrumb trails always gives your turn-based exploration (limited by your Wielder’s movement range) a purpose.
With your aggressive exploration, you’ll ultimately capture large towns for yourself, allowing you to construct some light cities to prepare for future fights. Even without a Wielder, these settlements can be controlled and developed, but you must plan how to utilize them. Since each settlement only gives you a limited number of free plots to build on, you’ll need to strike a balance between buildings that give you the best training for specific unit types and those that will accumulate the resources you need to draft them. There are never enough plots to unlock everything, and when you have multiple settlements of all shapes and sizes across the map, weighing up each piece of this mission-wide tactical puzzle can feel just as meaty and satisfying as building up your base in XCOM, though you can sell unused buildings to make room for better ones.
Home turfing won’t win. Many motives exist to fight, since objective markers constantly push you toward meticulous and deliberate progress. Due to the abundance of foes and their strategic placement, it’s unusual to explore the battlefield looking for a fight. Plus, even when you hit a dead end, there’s always something to make the journey worthwhile. Consider a rare resource mine or a strong new weapon that boosts your Wielder’s stats. Since Songs of Conquest has no time or round restriction, you’re never rushed. So retracing your ways for a couple circles is OK.
This may reduce risk-reward pressure, but Songs of Conquest’s subtleties are worth savoring, and not only visually. While troops may not transfer over between missions, your Wielder’s experience, equipment, and stats can, giving you plenty of reason to properly clean these maps. Even on the normal ‘Fair’ difficulty level, some of the latter missions will need every advantage. Sometimes Songs of Conquest’s conflicts are merciless, and not your fault.
Home turfing won’t win. Many motives exist to fight, since objective markers constantly push you toward meticulous and deliberate progress. Due to the abundance of foes and their strategic placement, it’s unusual to explore the battlefield looking for a fight. Plus, even when you hit a dead end, there’s always something to make the journey worthwhile. Consider a rare resource mine or a strong new weapon that boosts your Wielder’s stats. Since Songs of Conquest has no time or round restriction, you’re never rushed. So retracing your ways for a couple circles is OK.
This may reduce risk-reward pressure, but Songs of Conquest’s subtleties are worth savoring, and not only visually. While troops may not transfer over between missions, your Wielder’s experience, equipment, and stats can, giving you plenty of reason to properly clean these maps. Even on the normal ‘Fair’ difficulty level, some of the latter missions will need every advantage. Sometimes Songs of Conquest’s conflicts are merciless, and not your fault.
Battles occur on a grid of hexes with diverse terrain dependent on your overworld location. Rolling slopes and city walls give ranged forces more range and melee troops the upper hand on downhill opponents. Ponds, statues, and hedges provide natural choke spots. Try to walk into a melee unit’s zone of retribution, and they’ll score free hits on you. Ranged troops inflict extra damage when adversaries enter their ‘deadly’ zone, which is frequently closer than you’d want. Every war is a spectacle, even when you know you’ll lose. Every unit feels powerful, and when the camera zooms in slowly to depict the losing side’s last, agonizing end, its visual embellishments are delightful. The exception is when you’ve died. Then it’s salting the open wound.
These losses are seldom caused by poor planning, troop reinforcement, or bringing dagger-wielding assassins to a combat. In Songs of Conquest, there is no rock-paper-scissors battle system for unit kinds or elemental vulnerabilities to exploit with your Wielder’s magic spells. Everything comes down to clinical damage figures depending on the amount of soldiers in each tile unit. One of your soldiers may be 40 pikemen or five giant cannons, which have better base attack, defense, and health ratings and are restricted in size.
While damage previews explain how each unit’s attack strength is determined, I often couldn’t figure out why my stronger troops were being defeated by weaker ones. Why buy ten pricey ogres if 50 spearmen can skewer them before they even punch? The same happened for two of my cannons. They barely received one shot before being destroyed by his seven teams of 40 archers in a very difficult combat against another powerful Wielder. Maybe because he was performing double attack spells on them at the same time, but it was disrespectful that they fell so easy. In that conflict, the archers defeated my other troops each time, leaving me lowering my head in my hands and moaning, “How?” To my PC display, “How is he doing this?” This combat was supposed to be ‘Risky’ based on danger level, yet it felt otherwise.
I managed to kill him on my tenth try and after baiting him to attack me inside a settlement where I had another set of ballistas, but throwing everything at the wall and nothing sticking can make it feel like a turn-based strategy game with no strategy. That makes it difficult to figure out where you’re going wrong since there’s nothing to push back on except brutal force. I’ve found that quantity is usually better than warrior quality, and if your troop numbers drop below your enemy’s, they lose all tactical relevance because they can’t deal enough damage to make a dent in the opposing forces or defend themselves from incoming attacks. When even your archer troop is cut in half by goblin bagpipe players, that’s the kind of indignity that makes you wish he’d
In addition, not all conflicts are like way. Keep danger levels low by leveling up your Wielder and eating as many map boosters as possible. There’s still tons of fun to be had. Songs of Conquest kept me entertained for nearly 20 hours, and its ambitious storyline even got me through frustrating periods. Despite knowing that the fighting, settlement-building, and map exploration would be similar to what I’d played five hours before, I wanted to see what happened next. Similar to tactic comfort food. Most of the time, the same faction buildings produce the same unit types in somewhat varied forms and colors on the same maps and battlefield terrain. The rare hard kernel of unpopped popcorn is thrown in your jaw, but you’re determined to crunch through it since you won’t spit it out. Possibly just me.
Unfortunately, its dedicated, puzzle-style ‘Challenge Maps’ seem determined to mince you right away, and even its pre-made ‘Conquest Maps’ feel like they’re pitched too steeply, especially for those playing against the AI instead of real humans. Despite this, I’m excited to play Songs of Conquest’s large multiplayer component once my review build is released, as well as its mod scene and player-created campaign maps from its two-year early access. While its lack of strategic complexity may disappoint Fire Emblem and Total War veterans, like old Captain Silkspool, it has enough heart and goodwill to offset the bad notes. While it may not be a classic, it will have you tapping your toes till the next genre earworm.