When Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes originally released for the Nintendo DS way back in 2009, the idea of combining an RPG with a match-3 puzzle game was still relatively novel. Now, fourteen years later, that game design is well-trodden territory, but this still stands out from the crowd, with some interesting wrinkles and a lot of depth that keeps things interesting over the full course of its campaign.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes starts with a couple simple concepts. You move your units around a grid, matching three in a row vertically to attack or horizontally to create a defensive wall. However, a wide variety of character-specific abilities and different unit types keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Attacks take multiple turns to charge up, with more powerful attacks generally taking longer amounts of time, and this adds layers of strategy for linking and combining attacks to be more powerful, but also gives your opponent time to try and counter them.

The meat of Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is its single-player campaign, which tells a story in different parts from the perspective of multiple characters. The story itself isn’t really anything special, but the structure of switching between characters, each with their own abilities and completely different sets of available units, adds welcome variety in a genre where games are often prone to becoming very formulaic. Each character class has its own set of standard foot soldiers, as well as special units with more powerful abilities. There are a few areas where the game feels its age a bit, such as the lack of an autosave and no ability to quickly get out of a battle, but the campaign remains fresh and interesting throughout its 20-plus hour run.

In addition to the campaign, you can initiate a quick battle from the main menu featuring any combo of characters and units. There is also multiplayer, both local hotseat play and online battles. Online play can be done via private rooms or just random battles. Online play, in my experience, works very smoothly, getting in and out of battles fairly quickly.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes has held up very well despite many similar games coming out in the intervening years. It offers a high level of depth in its battle system that keeps you coming back, and is especially well suited to the Switch’s handheld mode that makes it easy to say “just one more battle.”