Review: Heroes of the Seven Islands
I have no idea how small the subset of gamers who’ll know what I’m talking about here is, but a huge number of the PC games I played pre-2005 were sold by publishers Sold Out Sales & Marketing through their £4.99 label Sold Out Software. That company, through a journey that I’m fairly sure is only of interest to me, is now Fireshine Games, but the orange and white boxes those games came in are still ingrained deep within my memory.
It’s been twenty years but I could still rattle through a good few titles off the top of my head: I mentioned Broken Sword 2 in our recent review of The Drifter, but I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia from just looking at the covers for things like Commandos, Pharoah, and titles that – probably for good reason – I’d long-forgotten before I started on this tangent, like Eidos’s Cutthroats. If I hadn’t lost you already, I must have done so there.
But there are two games, both developed by New World Computing and originally released in 1999, that stand out far above the rest from that catalogue. While plenty of people seem to be, quite rightly, nostalgic about Heroes of Might and Magic III (particularly judging by the number of subsequent attempts to re-bottle that game’s lightning), Heroes was a spin-off of a series that is now much less spoken about. While I’ll admit that Heroes III is pretty much neck-and-neck with it, there’s a game from that original series which I’m more sentimental about – though perhaps just due to it having been left more firmly in the past than Heroes ever was.
Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor was, much like its cousin Heroes III, the pinnacle of the series for me. That’s probably because it’s the first one I played – there’s a lot of love for its predecessor too, but the series has been more-or-less abandoned after original owners 3DO went bust in 2003 and Ubisoft bought the rights. There’s been one attempt to add to it since, which I tried (and failed) to enjoy —if you need the evidence, there’s footage in the video version of this review, of exactly that, from twelve years ago.
This is all a roundabout way of saying: I really quite liked Might and Magic VII – and so what really piqued my interest in the somewhat confusingly-named Heroes of the Seven Islands from developer Rap2h and published by 2 Left Thumbs was just one small statement: “Inspired by Might and Magic 3-8.” Nothing yet has managed to scratch that itch… surely this, by the developers own description, “poorly hand-drawn” micro-indie isn’t going to be the one to do it?
Image: Rap2h / 2 Left Thumbs
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Developer: Rap2h
Publisher: 2 Left Thumbs
Release: 9 September 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 11,79€/$11.99/£9.99
So first, for the people who are looking to relive some magic – or might – from a 26-year-old game: there’s a lot that hits right in terms of that nostalgia. The satisfying little magical trill that’s dangerously reminiscent of the one from Might and Magic, the barrels full of suspicious liquid that permanently boosts your characters’ stats, the rerolling of your party one hour in because you don’t like one of the classes you picked (and, in retrospect, what a massive difference that made here in the Seven Island — more on that in just a moment), or, most obviously of all, simply the layout of the game. There’s an awful lot more than just that, and if you’re a fan of the series you might already notice some of those similarities yourself, but so as not to lose the single reader who clicked on this video without caring about Might and Magic – and honestly, good on you – we’ll move on.
Image: Rap2h / 2 Left Thumbs
Anyone who’s played a party-based RPG, be it a single player experience or a full-blown MMO, will know the importance of having a balanced party. With four characters, I think it’s fair to say the go-to is typically someone tankier to soak up damage, a healer to restore any damage that’s taken, and then a couple of characters to deal damage – and, if we want to expand on that even further – one who’s magical and one who’s physical. So that’s what I adopted on my first attempt, almost the most obvious starting party: a Knight, Monk, Sorcerer and – to jazz things up – an Assassin instead of a Thief. By and large I was happy, with the first three classes performing their roles admirably, but the Assassin felt underwhelming. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing in a game like Seven Islands: the classes needn’t be entirely balanced as it allows for players to alter the difficulty by picking a team they perceive to be less optimal. If I ever sit down for a second playthrough of Seven Islands, which I don’t think is out of the question as I think there’s a fair amount of replayability, I’ll likely do so with a party of characters which I think might struggle a little more than the one I completed the game with.
Because, once I’d replaced my Assassin for a Barbarian, the game shaped out to be relatively straight-forward. The Barbarian and Sorcerer were dealing damage like crazy, the Knight was making everyone exceptionally resilient, and the Monk was doing his part by propping up any and all lost health each round. That would only improve over time: the Knight’s special ability continued to scale to keep everyone shielded, and the Monk and Sorcerer eventually learned some pretty powerful buffs that I could throw onto the Barbarian in the first round to allow him to always hit for maximum damage, and to take two attacks each turn. That became an incredibly competent strategy, which did lead to my battles playing out in pretty much the same every single time – but I can’t say I particularly minded. It did feel, to some extent, like I’d ‘broken’ the game: the final boss fight was far easier than even the most basic of fights I’d had in the early stages, but I’d also spent a significant amount of time ensuring everything was as maxed-out as possible before I got there.
Image: Rap2h / 2 Left Thumbs
I will quickly return to Might and Magic (sorry again to that one viewer) to point out that there is sometimes a little more depth to building a party – a key part of those games were their skills and the fact that not everyone could learn everything. In Might and Magic VII, the highest level a skill could become was ‘Grandmaster’, and most of those were unique to one of the game’s nine classes: the only class that could get to Grandmaster in Disarm[ing] Traps was the Thief, the only class who could become a Grandmaster Merchant was the Cleric; and both of those were things I was utterly adamant I needed when playing all those years ago.
Seven Islands borrows that mechanic, although it’s significantly more forgiving than its muse. Here, there are only three levels (Basic, Expert and Master) and many classes can become Master of any given skill. That means for some of the most important skills – like having at least one Master of Lockpicking in your team – you’re guaranteed to have someone who can learn it, provided each member of your party is a unique class. That’s probably just as well, as I couldn’t find any easy way to tell who could learn what, and I can imagine it would be incredibly frustrating to get halfway through a playthrough and realise you’d – quite literally, in that instance – locked yourself out of some incredibly valuable loot during your party selection. That does lead to the classes feeling a little homogenous in places, as their special abilities – which are, to be fair, very impactful – start to become the only thing unique about them. I would say that’s where my only criticism of the game lies: perhaps it would overcomplicate things, but I think having a little more uniqueness, such as certain schools of magic being locked to certain classes, might have pushed that replayability a little further and made me more keen to dive right back in with a different team composition.
The game’s story is about as basic as it gets, but that feels appropriate for what’s on offer: a convoluted tale with twists and turns would feel out-of-place against the intentional simplicity of everything else. It does mean that running through dungeons is how you spend almost all your time in the Seven Islands, though the occasional puzzle and side-quest does add enough extra content to break it up such that it never feels like a slog, and, for me at least, I never got bored during my playthrough. That playthrough lasted, suitable enough, around seven hours; I think that’s relatively fast – with a less well-oiled machine of a party I imagine there’d be a little more time spent on longer fights and tinkering to try and get them to an appropriate power level.
Image: Rap2h / 2 Left Thumbs
So, onto the rating: it’s a difficult one, as I can’t exactly quantify how much my experience with Heroes of the Seven Islands is influenced by nostalgia. There have been other games that were reminiscent of Might and Magic, the two-game Legend of Grimrock series comes to mind as something that looked like it should’ve hit that spot and ultimately… didn’t. I can honestly say that – short of loading up Might and Magic VII and playing it an inordinate amount of time under the guise of getting footage for this video – nothing has come as close to feeling like Might and Magic as Heroes of the Seven Islands. I can strongly recommend it for anyone who played those games and wants a throwback to them, though I think it’s still a neat enough experience that you can enjoy it without benefitting from that (for the forth and final time) nostalgia.
For me, with that caveat, it’s been one of my favourite gaming experiences in recent months, so I think that has to be reflected in my rating. Heroes of the Seven Islands is awarded an 8/10 by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.
