Limbic Entertainment and Ubisoft have just released the newest incarnation in the Might and Magic world, Might and Magic X: Legacy. Legacy is designed to give you that old school dungeon crawler experience, similar to games like Legend of Grimrock or Dungeon Master. What sets Legacy apart from it’s predecessors, is that the action isn’t just locked into tight, monster filled caves and dungeons, but expands to an entire surface world. Might and Magic X: Legacy gives you a much more complete turn based, grided, role playing game then the likes of Legend of Grimrock, but it comes with it’s own set of shortcomings as well.
Story
The initial cut scene for Legacy tells the player an epic tale of the ancient battle between angel and devil, with man caught in the middle. In the end, in order to end the conflict between angel and demon, Uriel manipulated Emperor Liam and the nations of the Empire, to hunt down and destroy the Faceless. After the death of the Emperor Liam, the mortals began to see through Uriel’s lies and discover that they have been manipulated all along. This truth began to tear into the Empire. Years of political treachery and outside conflict have taken it’s toll on the Empire, as it nears the edge of collapse. Your role in this story, has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
You represent a band of four adventurers, that are brand new to the lands of the Empire. What epic quest brings you to the Empire? The dying wishes of your old master to have his ashes buried in his homeland. While in Sorpigal Town, you pick up some other quests to pretty much just to pay the bills. These beginning quests include clearing out a well full of spiders, investigating a lighthouse, and removing a thieves’ den that is located near town.
The story does get a little grander as you proceed through the game, but nowhere near the level that is suggested in the introductory cut scene. It feels like the intro belongs to another game entirely. I can understand wanting to give the player some history about the land that the adventurers are heading to, but this could have also been done through books or other items in game, with an intro cut scene that is a little more connected to the game that is about to be played. Story is told through text boxes at the bottom of your screen whenever you interact with a person. You are given choices of topics to ask about or quests to undertake, but there is no real interaction with the people of Legacy. In comparison to the other dungeon crawlers I mentioned about, Legacy does have the best story going for it. However, that really is only because the other games had almost no story what so ever.
Game Play
Might and Magic X: Legacy does come in much stronger in the game play area of my review, but still has a few knocks against it. To start with, let’s talk about the overall game play type for Legacy. Legacy is a turn based, first person, grided, role playing game. This game plays almost exactly like others of its type, with the exception of being able to entire the wilds surrounding the towns. Legacy plays almost identical to the old school games of this type, and that is both a blessing and a curse.
You begin the game by selecting a difficulty mode, either normal or hard, then by creating a party of four. What’s nice about Legacy is that you can just use the default party and be very capable of finishing the game, or build your own party and experiment with the vast combinations of race, class, and spells to see what works. Races and classes are pretty typical of this type of genre that includes orcs, dwarves, elves, fighters, mages, rangers, and crusaders. Depending on the skills you choose in the beginning, your character will have a different role to play out. Building a tank, for example, utilizes different skills then a berserker, even though they are both considered warrior classes.
Combat is a thing of beauty in Legacy, and works very well at being tough but fair. Each character will have a set of skills and attacks that they can do on their turn, or use an item such as a potion or antidote. Combat becomes extremely tactical during some of the harder fights that you will run into. When will you sacrifice the damage out put for a taunt? Which spell to use to best help your party? Did you bring enough potions for everybody? These are very typical concerns and questions that you will be asked during your adventures. Using your mage to air blast a foe back, so that your ranger can entangle them and give your tank a few extra moments to heal up is a very satisfying experience.
What is not so satisfying is the movement when you are not in combat. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be that way since its turn based, but you should really be able to move a lot more smoothly if you are not in combat. Just because the older versions of this game did it, doesn’t mean we cannot make improvements. Also, while we are on the subject if irritants, let’s talk about Uplay and some of the bugs I ran into. I hate having to play a game I bought through some sort of authentication process, and Uplay is no better then any of the others that I’ve been forced to use. In fact, during the review process, I had to have a completely new authentication code sent to me, because Uplay locked me out of my original one due to a random bug. I also ran into some game ending bugs that caused me to have to restart to an earlier save file. In one case, it was simply that I could not walk through a door, like the party become stuck on something. While few and far between, game ending bugs are just inexcusable in this day and age. It shows a complete lack of quality control.
Aesthetics
Legacy is a graphical beast, which is weird to say for something of this genre. It’s not that it has the best graphics in town or just looks phenomenal, it’s a graphical beast because of it’s poor optimization. Legacy is taxing, even on higher end PCs, and doesn’t even look like it should be that much of a resource hog. Legacy is good looking, but is just way to taxing for what you get. The sound design is solid, you get some very nice music and sound effects that fit within the world you are exploring. There is no voice acting in game, so everything will have to be read through dialogue boxes. To be honest, the aesthetics department is the area that feels the most rushed with Legacy. No voice acting, bad optimization, visual glitches, and just overall lack of polish can be seen throughout the game when it comes to aesthetics, and that to me just lowers the overall feeling to Legacy.
Final Thoughts
Looking back through this review, I feel that I might have been a little harsher on Legacy than I meant to be. Truth be told, my experience with the game was very frustrating because of Uplay, the glitches, and how my machine ran Legacy. The core game play is truly a solid experience with old school dungeon crawlers. Legacy’s development feels like it was placed on an extremely tight budget that did not allow for the polishing that was required to turn a good game into a great game. I would definitely still recommend Legacy to anyone that has beaten Legend of Grimrock and is looking for a new dungeon crawler game. If you are looking to get into the genre for the first time, my suggestion is to play Legend of Grimrock first, since that is the better of the two games, then give Legacy a go if you liked Grimrock. Might and Magic X: Legacy is available now on Steam.
[easyreview title=”Product Review Score” cat1title=”Overall Score (out of 5)” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3″ ]
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