Might & Magic X: Legacy Review
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Introduction
At one point in the late eighties and early nineties, New World Computing's Might and Magic franchise was about as good as it got for RPGs. But then the developer created a tactical strategy spinoff called Heroes of Might and Magic in 1995, and as that franchise skyrocketed in popularity, the RPGs deteriorated, culminating with the disastrous Might and Magic IX in 2002. New World Computing went bankrupt soon after that, and while Ubisoft bought the rights to the Might and Magic universe (leading to the "and" becoming an ampersand, which we'll use from here on out), they only kept the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise going. The Might & Magic RPGs looked dead in the water.
But that was then and this is now. The gaming industry (not to mention Hollywood) just loves creating sequels and rebooting franchises, and the Might & Magic RPGs are finally getting another chance with Might & Magic X: Legacy. Developed by Limbic Entertainment (which is also responsible for Might & Magic Heroes VI), Legacy is an attempt to take players back to the World of Xeen glory days of the franchise. Gone is the effort to make Might & Magic look and play like every other RPG out there. Back are turns and gridded environments. Thanks to Legend of Grimrock, we just saw last year that this sort of old school engine can work. But does it work here? Keep reading to find out.
Character Creation
Unlike most RPGs where you create a single character and then either play the game solo or gather up companions as you go, in Legacy you create your full party of four characters right at the start. For each character you can pick one of four races -- dwarf, elf, human, or orc -- which in turn unlocks three possible classes for them (one "might" class, one "magic" class, and one hybrid). As an example, if you pick the dwarf race, then you can choose between the defender class (with a focus on heavy defense), the runepriest class (with a focus on fire magic), or the scout class (with a focus on crossbows). Each race gets a couple of passive bonuses, and the classes define which skills you can pursue.
Nicely, although characters have limited skills, there are still enough options for them that you need to make some (sometimes difficult) decisions for them as you level them up. For example, with the scout class, you gain access to four weapon skills, two magic skills, and eight utility skills. So you don't have to use crossbows if you don't want to. You can focus on dual wielding axes, or using a mace and a shield, or casting fire or light magic spells instead. Or some combination of the above.
Characters have six attributes: might (melee damage), magic (spell damage), perception (ranged damage), destiny (critical and evade chance), vitality (health), and spirit (mana). Each time your characters gain a level, they get four attribute points and three skill points to spend. Attributes don't have a maximum value, so you can min-max there to your heart's content, but skills have a maximum rank of 25, so you have to spread those points around. There are also trainers you have to visit for skills so you can pass certain thresholds. For example, after putting 7 points into a skill you have to visit an "expert" trainer for the skill before you can add any more. There are also "master" and "grandmaster" trainers, and one of the more tedious parts of the game is remembering where all of the 75+ skill trainers are located. Some classes are also limited by which trainers they can visit. Scouts, for example, can only use the "expert" and "master" trainers for maces, which means they're probably better off going with axes or crossbows, where they can reach "grandmaster" status.
Characters can also be promoted once. These promotions require the character to complete a quest, but the reward is a pair of new abilities. For example, once promoted the scout class turns into the pathfinder class, and characters gain extra range on their crossbow attacks plus a "snaring shot" skill, which immobilizes an enemy for one turn. Promotions are also required for characters to reach the grandmaster rank in their skills, and are usually more important for that reason.
During your travels in the game, you can also meet some hirelings. These characters don't fight for you in the same way as your party members, but they give you some sort of a bonus. For example, you can meet a dog who sniffs out secret doors, a horse who increases your inventory space, a woman who increases your chances of finding gold and magic equipment, and a bodyguard who sometimes blocks attacks. Most hirelings cost you money up front plus a percentage of the money you find while they're attached to your party, but others travel with you because of quests, and they don't cost you anything.
Gameplay
Like the Might & Magic games of old, and like Legend of Grimrock more recently, Legacy employs a turn-based engine, where you travel through a square-gridded environment using a first-person perspective. You use the WASD and the QE keys to move and rotate your view, you use the spacebar to interact with NPCs and objects (like chests and shrines), and you use the 1-0 keys (or menu selections) to do everything else. Your party always moves together, and there is no "front row" or "back row" for protection purposes.
During combat, your party takes its turn (your party members can go in any order), then enemies take their turn, and then the process repeats itself until your party or your enemies are dead. Characters get to take a single action on their turn, including quaffing a potion, casting a spell, or using a melee or ranged attack. Accessing your (shared) inventory doesn't cost a turn, but movement requires that all of your characters have their action remaining, so you can't shoot and run. If an enemy moves into melee range of your party, then (inexplicably) you're not allowed to move at all.
Sometimes combat is simple, and regular attacks get the job done, but at other times you need to be more creative. As an example, there are times when you run into undead creatures called ravenous ghouls. By default, these ghouls get one attack per turn, but when their health falls under 50% they double their attacks, and if you miss an attack against them or they block an attack, then they get an extra attack. That means if you're not careful, ravenous ghouls might pop off 8-10 attacks in a single turn -- and probably kill whoever they're attacking. So you either need to limit your misses against them, or you need to attack them like crazy and then use a spell like "gust of wind" to blow them back one square where they can't attack anything. There are plenty of offensive and utility spells available in the game, and knowing how to use them can be the difference between impossible fights and easy victories.
Outside of combat, you spend plenty of time wandering around the 140x100 game world, where you can visit towns, dungeons, mysterious crypts, dangerous caves, and more. Towns are your main source for quest NPCs, shops, and trainers. Dungeons are where you complete most of the quests. Crypts are where you solve puzzles, usually by stepping on pressure plates in the right way, and where you receive relics, which are powerful pieces of equipment that gain experience when you do, up to level 4. Caves contain nasty bosses, including dragons and a cyclops. There are also miscellaneous battles scattered throughout everywhere, but enemies do not respawn, so there's a limit to how much experience you can gain in the game (enough to reach level 33 or so).
Once you've fought a battle and need to restore your health and mana, you're given a few options. There are healing fountains you can use, but they only replenish themselves once a week. You can rest at an inn, but that requires you to be in a town. You can camp anywhere in the world (including towns), but this requires "supplies" (which you can only hold in limited quantities) plus a safe location. You can also use potions, but they're expensive, and they're mostly intended for use during battles.
Equipment is pretty basic in the game. There are regular items, "green" items with one bonus, "blue" items with two bonuses, and "yellow" relics that can have three bonuses. There aren't any set items. Equipment can break in the game, but oddly it doesn't appear as if items get worn down before breaking. They just suddenly break, which is sort of annoying because not only is there no way to protect yourself (other than by keeping extra weapons around), the only way to repair broken items is to trudge back to town, which gets tedious after a while (unless you have the "spirit beacon" spell, and then it's quick and easy). Luckily, relics can't break, and you find several during your travels. Magic items also need to be identified before they can be used, but in this case there's at least a spell that can do the job as well as the trudging back to town method.
Finally, the layout of the world is interesting. In most games the enemies are easiest next to the starting town and then get tougher the farther away you get. Legacy follows that pattern a little, but it also throws tough creatures at you all over the place. For example, near the starting town are a pair of dangerous caves that you won't be able to complete until you're around level 15, plus a dungeon designed for level 20 characters. You can also encounter tough enemies without warning while exploring the wilds. This can make the game a little frustrating at times, as you try to negotiate the "safe" places where your party can survive and thrive. I wouldn't mind Legacy's layout as much if there was actually a way to retreat from enemies (there isn't; you can't move when enemies are adjacent to you) or if it didn't take so long to load saved games.
The Story
Might & Magic X: Legacy takes place a few years after the events in Might & Magic Heroes VI, but this doesn't make much of a difference, as the children of the Griffin dynasty are far off on the sidelines (except for Sandor, who you meet), and the world you explore could pretty much be a world in any game. As the game opens up, you're trying to reach the city of Karthal so you can deliver your mentor's ashes to the temple there, but of course life is never that easy. You quickly discover that Karthal is experiencing a revolt and that its gates are locked, and so you have to putter around completing side quests for a while until you're finally allowed to sneak into the city (at the halfway point of the game). From that point forward, sadly, Legacy follows a standard RPG trajectory, where you learn that an evil being is trying to do something evil, and you have to stop it.
Sometimes good writing can elevate cliche-ridden stories so that they're still enjoyable to experience, but Legacy doesn't have good writing. The dialogue is usually just a few perfunctory sentences to give you a reason why you should go kill something, or track down something, or explore somewhere, even when it doesn't make any sense (like when you decide you don't like the "winner" of the revolt in Karthal). There aren't any memorable lines, and there aren't any memorable characters, except for maybe Might & Magic darling Crag Hack, who you find running a pirate town. Luckily, the combat and character development are fun enough that the game works even without a compelling story, but if you're a developer and you want a good game or a great game, then you need all parts of it to click, and not just some of them.
Want an example? For the very first quest in the game, you're asked to kill some spiders under a well. The quest giver makes a joke that at least he's not asking you to kill rats in a cellar... except that he is, and nobody on the writing staff seems to realize that the quests are all but the same. There's just no awareness or life in the text, and even the attempts at humor fall flat.
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.
