Disciples III looks like every other game. While it does keep a similar art design, its animations and 3D-ness do nothing to add to the experience. Everything about this game screams “me too!”

Veterans of the series will recognize some elements that are holdovers from the earlier games. You still have to pick a path for your units – do you choose your Cultist grunts to grow up to be Sorcerers or Witches? Healers can progress to heal one unit a substantial amount of hit points or mass heal the entire group for less hit points. It‘s just like the old game in this regard. You also still have the rods which are jammed into the ground that spread your influence over your realm, gathering any resource areas that it engulfs.

The game sports three long campaigns: one for the Humans, Elves and Demons. Each comes equipped with a pat story, bland as plain toast voice acting, and a shockingly weak (i.e. suicidal) AI opponent—and every map is created like a puzzle, which makes it feel anything but like a strategy game. Everything is a set piece. This wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that there are no single player one-off games that aren’t part of the campaign. This is a huge disappointment as Disciples II shipped with a slew of individual maps for solo and multi-player play and here …you get hot seat multiplayer only and absolutely no custom map design options at all.

Truth is, everything that is novel about Disciples III was already in Disciples II, and the new stuff is basically a retread of features from other games. It’s frustrating to see the path Akella took for the third and I will assume final game in this series, because the fans that remember the old games are likely going to fire this up and wonder just what in the world happened to the game that they loved, because this clearly is no longer it.