Hearts of Iron III
Skip · Strategy · 2009
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 12.8h
- Value
- $0.78/hr
- Reviews
- 76% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900 videocard, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Hearts of Iron III lets you play the most engaging conflict in world history, World War 2, on all fronts as any country and through multiple different scenarios. Guide your nation to glory between 1936 and 1948 and wage war, conduct diplomacy and build your industry in the most detailed World War 2 game ever made.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.99. That was October 2015. It has been discounted 109 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 19 percent on value. It is pricier than 70 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 64 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Hearts of Iron IV ($49.99, scores 82) beats it on value, while it beats Steel Division 2 ($39.99, scores 41).
Of the 682 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 10 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 50 percent of the 846 reviews written there were positive, against 76 percent overall, and those are 17 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 12.8 hours; clearing it takes 244, which is 19 times the campaign.
Players
49 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
It's just BS that it fails to load the map and there is no fix that works. Now it won't open at all!
I simply cannot recommend ANY Paradox game. with their current business model of screwing the player while trying to milk as much money as possible.
TLDR: It's the ultimate logistics simulator for hardcore strategy purists, but the interface is dated and the engine stability is terrible on modern rigs. You will need to buy "Their Finest Hour" DLC to enable CPU multicore optimizations. I would also recommend downloading the 4GB LAA patch online to let the executable use more RAM. Hearts of Iron III is a great military RTS game based in WW2. You can play as any...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Hearts of Iron III scores 48/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/25890/hearts-of-iron-iiiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.