Might & Magic X: Legacy Review
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Article Index
Graphics and Sound
The graphics for Legacy have their ups and downs. On the good side, the world you explore doesn't look like it occupies gridded space, which I thought was an impressive feat. There is also enough variety to the environments, and no cookie cutter locations, so the world stays interesting throughout the entire game. The day/night cycles also look nice. But on the downside, the combat animations are minimal at best, and the spell effects aren't anything to write home about, either.
For the sound, there aren't ups and downs. It's pretty much just all down. There is little in the way of voice acting for the game, with a few (seemingly random) lines being acted for the main quests and nothing for the side quests. The most voice acting comes from your party. They're given "barks" that they can shout out in combat or at random times. A couple of the barks are amusing (like when elves commune with trees), but they're repeated so often that they just get annoying. If I never hear an orc say "I kill you" again I'll be happy. Luckily, you can turn the barks off in the interface. The volume of the speech is also an issue. Half the time the volume dropped so low I couldn't hear what people were saying.
Issues
Might & Magic X: Legacy is the second Limbic Entertainment game I've played (the other being Might & Magic Heroes VI), and while both games do a good job of drawing you in and keeping you playing, they also have a series of problems, some of which are head-scratching. The most obvious problem with Legacy is that ranged attackers take a 50% damage penalty when they're in melee combat. Well, 99% of the game is played in melee combat, and so ranged characters are almost worthless. How could that not be amazingly obvious to anyone designing or testing the game? How does something like that make the final release?
Some other issues include broken quests, placeholder text, extremely slow load times (especially when you enter the world map), the game trying to be "smart" about the combat order of your party but only messing things up (if I had an option for the leftmost character always going first, I'd be thrilled), and a weird rule where only "awake" characters earn experience. Since there is a limited amount of experience in the game, the latter rule means that any fight where somebody is stunned or paralyzed or actually dead when the experience is awarded misses out, and you're better off loading and trying again than continuing on. This increases the amount of loading in the game by an order of magnitude, especially for boss fights, and it's just annoying. I can understand dead characters not getting experience, but stunned ones? Really?
On the plus side, I spent about 60 hours playing the game (completing it once on the default "adventurer" difficulty setting and then trying it out for a while on the more difficult "warrior" setting), and it only crashed once. That being said, it got hung up a few times in combat when enemies refused to take their turn, and these required loads just like a crash, but still, less than ten problems in 60 hours isn't too bad, especially for an RPG. I've also heard that the first patch is supposed to address some of the problems I've listed here (such as ranged damage), so perhaps the game will be better off by the end of the month.
Conclusion
Overall, while Might & Magic X: Legacy isn't going to win anybody's Game of the Year award, I thought it had more pluses than minuses. The battles in the game are tough, with a lot of ways for you to get through them, and character development gives you plenty of avenues for putting your party together. I also got hooked a few times, just wanting to fight one more battle or visit one more trainer or walk to town to turn in one more quest, only to look up and see that I had played for far longer than I intended. Of course, the graphics and sound aren't great, the writing is forgettable, and there are other issues, but I think Legacy can provide 50+ hours of reasonable entertainment for $25, and so it's a game to keep in mind.
