This game is what you could call the "definitive" version of Disciples 3. It takes a lot from the first two iteration of D3 and revamps it to make something that is actually enjoyable to play.

The biggest problem with original D3 is that it tried to be as close as possible to Disciples 2 in some parts and something completely different (mostly a HoMM clone) in others. The result was an inconsistent, bipolar mess that was neither a proper successor to D2 nor a good rival to Heroes franchise. Not to mention buggy.

D3:Reincarnation tries to reconcile the two dysfunctional aspects of the earlier D3 games, and, in my opinion, succeeds in doing so.

For those who never played Disciples 3 before: this is turn-based strategy game in the vein of Heroes of Might and Magic. You start with a capital city and a hero, and your job is to recruit an army, explore the map, gather resources, capture new cities, level up yourself and your army, and eventually defeat whatever is the boss of that map particular map.

What sets this game apart from HoMM, Eador and similar games is the fact that your "army" consist of only a few characters (the actual number is determined by your hero's leadership skill, but caps at six), each of whom gains experience and levels up independently. For that reason it feels more like leading a party of characters in an RPG, than leading an army in a strategy game.

This impression is enforced even further by the inventory/equipment system for heroes.

Characters don't die permanently unless your entire army gets wiped and can be revived by potions, spells or by paying money in a controlled towns. After gaining three levels, a character "upgrades" to a more powerful class, granted you built the appropriate building in your capital. Some characters have mutually exclusive upgrade paths, allowing you to customize your army composition to better suit your play style.

When playing single player campaign, your hero retains the levels and equipment from the previous map, but the army starts from square one.

This version of D3 includes 4 playable factions and a campaign for each of them. Campaign themselves were redesigned from the earlier versions and now include water traveling. Character stats were also changed substantially to better fit the new hex-based combat (earlier versions just took the stats system from D2 and tried to make it work in a completely new combat system, with not so stellar results).

Overall, this version of D3 takes all that was good in previous versions and reworks the rest. If you have an interest in this genre, and weren't irreversibly scarred by earlier D3 versions, you should find this to be a very enjoyable game. It may not be Disciples 2, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

There is a lot of good things in Reincarnation, but the AI and map progression issues have not been resolved from the previous versions.

In general:

The Good:
-Fun races, lots of units, nice strategic approach.
-Nice Music.
-Graphically appealing, while not being demanding. Well Optimized. (Not last gen tough).
-Good Campaign Storyline.
-Almost no bugs or glitches (so far).
-Leveling system is addictive and dynamic. Can have different builds.

The Bad:
-Horrible AI. Seriosuly.
-Strategic approach is fine, execution is terrible. Weird and unfair issues with CPU enemies.
-Extremely slow paced gameplay.
-Difficulty is based 100% in the raw power of the enemy armies and it scales poorly as the game goes on.
-Once behind it's almost impossible to recover.

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Now, explaining with more detail:

1.- Disciples is a franchise that relies heavily into the management of the encounters you have. The main strategy of the matches rely heavily in how you develop your troops WITHOUT DYING, mainly because the game punishes you hard if you loose a leveled squad. In the past, this kind of difficulty was appealing, but by today standards, it's just not well implemented.
The game is more about choosing the right targets to level up and not about the strategic combat. This means that the difficulty is developed by the way you approach the leveling and not about the challenge of battling or developing the resources.

2.- The AI is just broken.
During the map phase, all the enemy armies just clean the mobs and level up in a certain rate, making few mistakes, while you need to see your way trough the random neutral troops that can range from easy to impossible. While the idea of having a linear leveling experience is boring, making you roam the map searching for the right mobs seems hardly an improvement. This is worsened by the fact that you can't afford to loose a single troop from the squad, so you will be repeating certain battles just for the sake of keeping the squad alive and not loose time in healing (wich, too, can be punishing in certain situations). And you can add to this the fact that while you loose time choosing targets, the AI already knew the right path so now it's 3 levels abobe you and still power-clearing camps.

In combat is worse. Melees will approach to engage, ranged will target the nearest high priority target (weakest).
No much variation there. All the difficulty relies in you having to clear the lesser troops because usually the neutral enemies will have an outstanding threat that you need to carefully engage if you don't want to get one-shotted. And that is all. It's an easy clean or a fight you will have to repeat until the mobs behave the way you needed or until certain platforms that give you power spawn in better positions for you (wich ends up being the only strategy that the field of battle provides and that is completely random. The AI will rarely use them well).

-While fun and useful when you level and clear the map, spells are rather secondary. They can be extremely necesary in certain maps that have incredible neutral camps difficulties; and be just a fun thing to do in other scenarios.


Don't get me wrong with this review. Reincarnation is still a good game. It pretty much is a revamp of disciples 2 with a new combat system that is not really that cool. But i can hardly recommend it with all the issues it haves. Gaming has gone a long way from the games that had broken gameplay and weird AI issues. D3 should have been the improvement in those departments and not just the downfall because they not only couldn't fix them but maked them worse.

There were other minor issues, but i settled with the most important in my opinion. To do this review i waited to play enough time, but now I felt like I was ready to give an honest, objective opinion about the game.
Cheers!

Finally! It comes to Steam Store...

Reincarnation is the real Disciples 3. It's Renaissance+Resurrection, with refined tactical system and magic. Its combat is more like an advanced version from Disciples 2. The Combat area is smaller now, and every unit has their own limited movement and attack range, which makes formation extremely important. Ships and thief abilities are back, too! How could a old Disciples Fans miss all these features!!??
Although there are still a few balance issues (poor Alliance QAQ...), and a little bugs as well (we have some non-official fix. don't know whether the steam version has fixed them or not), the game has the whole mechanic remastered and fixed all the buggy and annoying problems from the old 2.

Moreover, Reincarnation is very mod-friendly. It provides map editor and file-export function. Players could make mod themselves in a very convenient way. Don't miss it! (Really hope it could provide Workshop support

Although, not sure if I may see the Clan back agian in this series.... I really don't want to see them just stand in the wild to give you experience like the green skins do....... Anyway, let's hope the Reincarnation may be the reincarnation for the series... and "reincarnation" enough to bring us the Clan back in the future...

Disciples 3 was a misguided affair. Buggy, unbalanced trying too much to copy from Heroes of Might and Magic it strayed far for Disciples 2. Reincarnation is an attempt to redo the game. Most bugs were squashed, balancing was redone, battlefields were made much smaller (so it is closer to D2 choice of who to attack instead of running around the field). If you haven't played D2, do so, it is still a much better game. But if you played D2 to death, this version of D3 is actually quite decent. Unfortunately the developer went bankrupt before they finished a planned Mountain Clans DLC so this faction is missing.

Someone needs to give the team/person who worked on this version of Disciples 3 and give him the money he needs to finish the game properly. Dwarfs are missing, I know the history on how the developer went bankrupt and all, but here is an example of a team/person who knows how to develop this series. Sad that good franchises end this way. I hope someone will continue this one. Reincarnation is great, but could be much better if this would have been the first one out instead of the prior ones before this.

If you are new to the Disciples series get this one and not the others and you will enjoy it, well worth the current price. If you are a long time fan well it is not Disciples 2 but, as I you may come to like this version of Disciples 3. Worth the price to try and see.

Imagine if Disciples 3 never existed and instead Disciples II was actually remade into a next gen game. While the base D3 was somewhat iffy, Reincarnation is an awesome game all around. This was achieved by retooling and improving almost every single aspect of the original game.

Pros:
+ four vastly different factions with their own strengths and weakness
+ multiple upgrade paths for units allowing for flexibility
+ very long (we're talking 40+ hours each) campaigns
+ the gorgeous art style, graphics and awesome music

Cons:
- some rough edges like one or two mismatched voices

The Disciples series is one of the most beautiful underrated franchise in gaming strategy. It is the same genre as the classic Heroes of Might and Magic, and it has become a sort of "cult classic"ever since the massive success of Disciples II.

This third entry follows that tradition, by keeping a beautiful, dark, artwork, combined with unforgiving mechanics and an enticing world/factions. However, Disciples 3 was a complete wreck at launch, laden with game breaking bugs and suffering with inferior mechanics to it's predecessor.

The "Reincarnation" version of the game, the one I'm reviewing, is definitely a more polished version of Disciples 3 "Gold" (the vanilla + ressurection expansion). This, sadly, does not mean the game was completely overhauled in it's faults, but simply that all of it's game breaking bugs were fixed and some balancing issues were addressed.

Overrall, Disciples 3: Reincarnation is a good game which follows a strong tradition laid by the classic Disciples II. However, it is still, at it's best, an unpolished gem, very rough in the edges. That means people with low tolerance to lack of polish will not enjoy this game, and people new to the series fare better to begin their immersion in the Disciples world with the predecessors games. However, if you are a fan of the HOMM-like strategy genre, you will definitely like this game, which is by itself worth your money in any sale, as unpolished as it may be.

The definitive version of Disciples 3, with many improvements, but also carries over some of the faults found in the original release. Difficulty still fluctuates all over the place during the campaigns and so missions can turn into grind fests.

Worth picking up on sale.

Disciples III - Reincarnation is the 3rd (yes, third) release of Disciples III after the first two entries were so bugged that the entire fanbase went haywire. Sadly to say, Reincarnation isn't without flaws either, but overall it is the best Disciples III experience out there and doesn't suffer as much from queststopping and gamebreaking bugs as its predecessors anymore.

All that being said, it still pales in comparison to Disciples II.

Personally, I had my fair share of fun with this title, but I can only recommend it to fans of the franchise and to diehard fans of the Heroes of Might and Magic as well as Age of Wonders series. Everyone else might want to steer away from this.

I wanted very, very badly to like Disciples 3. The art is as stunning as Disciples 2, perhaps even more so. However, the balance is all off - XP gain is not proportional to threats, combat is a slow and frustrating affair (unless you're losing, at which point it will end in two rounds), and even after battles that I've won I had to make a trip back to my capital every single time to resurrect people. And then, if I'm unlucky, sit and mash "END TURN" until I have the money to afford them.

The fact that I can only claim land in specific points also adds to the tedium, as I have to watch my territory ponderously expand toward resource cites that I've cleared out for dozens of turns before they are claimed.

Of course, the quest dialogue and voice-overs are terrible. Fortunately there's an easy way to turn unit voices off.

There were plenty of improvements between Disciples 2 and Disciples 3, by the way. Combat is now on a tactical grid a la Heroes of Might & Magic. Each grid has randomly-determined sites that can increase the effectiveness of one unit type, and leveraging these effectively can make a moderate battle into an easy one (although they still don't make difficult battles into reasonable threats). Some overworld spells can be cast into runes, which can then be used to cast a scaled-down version of the spell during a battle. Heroes have something not unlike a very toned-down version of the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X, or the leveling system in Final Fantasy 12 - basically a grid in which each square has some sort of bonus, and you can claim any square adjacent to an already-claimed square when leveling up.

But ultimately I'd give this one a skip, even as a fan of the genre.