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Type: Roleplaying (Fantasy)
Rating: 4/10
I have been (and still am) pretty fond of MM3-MM5. Though I must admit that this is not only due to the games themselves, but also some "external" circumstances under which I played them, I had much fun with all of them. I played MM3 about four or five times and was very happy with it the first time and even could still wrestle some entertainment out of it the last time I played it.
Unfortunatly MM6 (and having seen MM9 which is even worse, probably all of the following editions) definitly does not stand up to this standard.
For some reason I still managed to play it a little longer than Morrowind though I can't give any specifc reason for this. Only to justify why I have given this game one more point ...
From all I know, Might and Magic has always been a good deal behind the state of the art, even for its time, in this sector. In my opinion 3D graphics should either be really good or not used at all. Let's say, the graphics are ... acceptable.
More or less ok, though some of the minor annoyances that had been removed in MM4 and MM5 - like that you can't switch between characters when you are looking at the spellbook for example - are there again. The movement buttons on the screen for mouse use that were present in the earlier games have gone, so you have to use the arrow keys for movement. Together with the fact, that you will almost always have to press SHIFT for running and that the movement keys are on the right side of most keyboards, like the mouse, make playing a little inconvenient.
While the earlier editions were turn based, MM6 features a "realtime" mode by default - also in battle. In my opionion, everyone playing the battles in realtime is either masochistic or stupid - or maybe I'm just to slow (but I've been playing a number of ego shooters with some success, so that's probably not the issue here).
Maybe it's the graphics, the big plain deserted areas, the gray sky and the view restriction that more often than not imposes the effect of eternally walking through mist, but I felt pretty lost and uncomfortable most of the time - which is totally different from the earlier games which, for all monsters and battles, always had a much, much friendlier feel to them.
I'd really like to know why most game designers seem to think that huge landscapes, more or less empty except for a bunch of boring and annoying monsters, should be entertaining in any way. The problem of the "infamous world size inflation" started already in MM4 and MM5, but was compensated quite a bit due to the fact that you could just press the movement keys faster to get around the land. With the "realtime" gaming introduced in MM6 this is no longer possible - you have to go with the default speed the game allows you and as always, this is far to slow.
Well, at least nearly every house that you can enter has at least something to offer, even if it is only a small bit of information. Unfortunatly often the cities consist of many houses and I recommend you draw a good map with names and all or you'll get pretty frustrated looking 20 minutes for this guy that teaches experts in swords or something ...
The earlier MM games definitly don't score on realism in any way, but they also definitly were fun - packed with quests, dungeons and especially riddles and puzzles every few steps. Sure, being able to find goldpieces in every tree and items in every heap of rubble isn't the most interesting thing to be but nearly everything around at least had some use. From all I know this has changed noticably from MM6 on. Like in far too many other games, all you seem to do is run around a (pretty boring) landscape fighting hordes of (boring and annoying) monsters.
The quests involve only the usual "go there and find this" which is just another word for "clean out that dungeon" in a long, sometimes almost endless series of - did I say it? - pretty boring battles. The only thing at least resembling a puzzle I have found so far (and I have done about fifteen quests or so by now) is when I had to find the right lever that opened a door somewhere else. Pretty poor entertainment IMHO ...
Can't say much about the story right now. Something about saving the world, as usual.
Medium, I'd say. Problem is that the monsters sometimes can be frustratingly hard, especially as the always come in large numbers. Quests almost always (only) require you to find something which is not very challenging except that it means running around everywhere in the desperate hope of getting to the right place someday.
No bugs at least. The game ran totally stable on my system.
So this is how the decline of the Might and Magic series started ...
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Last modified: September 11 2008 09:38:14 by Thorsten Thielen URL of this page: www.c2226.de/reviews/games/mm6.phtml |
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