With a modern, beautiful take on detailed pixel art, a fantastic pace and gameplay that feels like a fantastic balance between old-school and modern, Songs of Conquest flies out of the blocks with an impressive and surprising performance. Fans of turn-based games like Fire Emblem, Heroes of Might and Magic and even those browser based games where you recruit troops and build a huge army only to have them wiped out in seconds should pay close attention to this one.
Starting out with access to a single campaign, but with scope to unlock a total of four, Songs of Conquest has a ton of content. The opening few turns can prove challenging as the tutorial teaches you how to play the game, without really delving into some of the more nuanced aspects. Nonetheless, once you’re up and running, Songs of Conquest really starts to reveal the depth of its gameplay.
Players control one or more heroes who occupy a map filled with locations to visit, enemies to vanquish and treasures to discover. You’ll explore this map based on a limited number of movement points per hero, and each hero is accompanied by a small band of warriors and misfits that will scale based on their level. Most heroes can command a handful of about four to five units by default, with more experienced heroes moving closer to ten in any given scenario.
Most locations are fairly innocuous, and there’s a pleasant sense of generosity throughout Songs of Conquest. A location might simply give you a ton of gold or resources, or it might actually join your empire (allowing you to construct buildings that generate income or troops). Other locations might offer a choice, such as to recruit a small band of bowmen, or a much larger band of peasants. If you can’t take such a unit, you might be able to take gold instead — there’s rarely a bad choice, but almost always something that is better for your current situation.
When you do get into combat, the perspective switches to a sort of semi third person perspective hexagonal map, onto which your units will be placed opposite the enemy. It’s always clear before a battle whether you’re likely to win or not, and most enemies will hang around waiting for you, rather than chasing you down. Battles can be quite tough, but your magic spells, songs and abilities can swing the balance, as will some basic maneuvering such as taking the high ground for an advantage. I would argue that terrain plays too small a role in combat, but that’s splitting hairs really.
Speaking more about combat. If you want it to be, Songs of Conquest can get quite deep. On the more challenging difficulty levels (with names like “overwhelming”) things get really, really difficult if you’re not able to make the most of every small advantage. Rarely for a modern turn-based RPG, you can lose an entire battle simply because you flippantly chose to move a unit into “deadly” range rather than leaving it just outside. Equally, using spells at just the right moment is just as important — all things that a seasoned player (and especially someone who wants to play online) will need to learn.
Off the battlefield, and aside from the generous exploration system, there’s actually quite an interesting and deep economic system. It’s nothing ground-breaking in terms of supply chain, but you will need to claim mines, quarries and fields in order to generate various kinds of income. These will allow you to develop larger towns with defensive structures and recruitment buildings that allow you muster more troops each time you visit.
Whilst buildings are quite basic at the outset, by the latter stages of even the first campaign, you’ll be managing full blown castles, as well as their outlying farms and supporting buildings. This leads to a lot of variety in units, also. By the end of the first campaign the mixed army of humans and fae was so varied that I was having to process a huge amount of skills, abilities and situational strengths and weaknesses… In some ways this is proper, old school fantasy strategy at its finest – to the extent that it reminded me of the days when I used to have to write things down in a notepad besides my PC.
In terms of how Songs of Conquest looks, for me it’s a win. Yes, this is pixel-art (which we’ve seen a lot of over the past few years) but it’s the kind of densely detailed, smooth pixel-art that I can’t help but love. Characters have real detail and personality, as do buildings and other aspects in the environment. Despite how small everything is, I never really felt that I was having to squint to see things, or that I was missing the detail due to the sizing. The music and sound effects fit the visuals perfectly, and the overall atmosphere is high fantasy at its most fantastic.
Songs of Conquest is exactly why I love indie games. It’s a good looking, well made game that pours shame on most AAA experiences. It’s smarter, bigger, tougher and more enjoyable than almost any other game I played throughout 2024 and into early 2025, with almost nothing to criticise. I could say that at times it feels a little too hard, but it generally makes up for this through the generosity of its world, and how readily it gives you chances to gain exp, gold, troops and other resources to overcome your own shortcomings in battle. Whilst this is grinding of a sort, it just never feels like it in Songs of Conquest.
Songs of Conquest is on PC and Android.
