The game is like the mother’s day breakfast you make once a year. Full of love and charm but tastes uneven and you end up making a mess in the kitchen that your mom has to ignore while she pretends to enjoy.
A reimagining of an older concept of squad-based first-person roleplaying games, Might & Magic X: Legacy (popularly known as the ‘MMX’ series) is set in a fantasy setting with turn based combat and tile-based movement. You do not need to know anything about the previous MMX games to enjoy this game, as this follows a more personal storyline of a group of adventurers caught in a country with civil distress and huge monsters seeking blood. The game is an open world grid based RPG with focus on combat and your character stat sheet.
Gameplay
There is a lack of a good tutorial and explanation of mechanics (like resting and fatigue) but once you get the hang of it, in a few hours they feel natural and well integrated into the overall combat mechanics. The combat is probably the strongest point of the game, with a lot of character and spell variety, to allow various classes and interesting heroes in the party. There is a lot of strategy and depth in combat with various spell effects to find interesting combos that work well together. The game will punish you until you figure out how to counter certain attacks or get some effective combos together. Even so, there are some massive difficulty jumps against the various bosses, which makes taking them out very satisfying. Slaying a boss generally marks an end to the act or quest. The only way I could even take on the high difficulty bosses was to ensure I kill all of the minions in all the other rooms first, although that is not a necessity.
MMX: Legacy is one of those games where the addictive nature of ‘one more mission’ is ever so present. But it’s alright since every mission demands strategy, forcing you to carefully tread each step and weighing your choice of spells and resistance. With most enemies capable of killing your party members on their own, surviving an onslaught of a bunch of these formidable opponents with the last bit of your remaining health provides for the making of an exhilarating feeling. Unfortunately, loot is limited with not a lot of drops, however investing in an item or Armour as immediate visible improvements do help.
Story
The complete lack of a story (Interesting story) hurts the game a lot, to the point that there needs to be a narrator that keeps telling you how awesome you are for killing some random naga’s and ghosts. Y’know, someone to pat your back really. For most of it’s design choices, I could say the game is going for an old school feel and be done with but that would be unfair as it is important to critique the game with comparison to modern mechanics, since they generally offer better experience. The lack of randomness and player choices effects the re-playability of the game as a game that relies on trying out different characters and classes to achieve more interesting battles is wasted, as it soon goes tiresome after your second batch, since all the enemies and chests are in the same exact location and there is no choice/consequence that changes the storyline at all. It fells like a slow race to the finish line where you make your own adventures as you go along, a strong single player experience for those who like a challenge and like to make heroic deeds from their imagination.
Graphics and Audio
The environment’s vision is beautiful and a coherent art style making ever thing in the game look ‘appropriate.’ However the artistic vision is lost in with bad textures and mudded walls and grainy objects, the UI in contrast is very neat and very functional. On a technical level, there are glitches abound, You loose your sense of immersion when enemies clip through the terrain or have objects passing through their torso. The game is horrendously optimized, with frequent frame drops and uneven frame-rates (even on a GeForce GTX 780).
MMX: Legacy has some very basic sound assets that fail to impress. Dialogues are repeated by the characters so often and with a complete lack of enthusiasm or aptness for the situation that it feels ridiculous to even have character voice options in your character creation. There is some voice acting for the NPC dialogues but they are uneven ranging from above average to complete failure, that you feel like you are watching a really bad B grade Bollywood movie. Even the spell effects are subtle and feel underwhelming.
Conclusion
MMX: Legacy, rather than pushing anything forward, stays in a closed isolated time-warp, it is forever stuck in a limbo for an era bygone. For those looing to reenact the past this is the perfect place to look, others might be left wondering what the fuss was all about. The biggest problem with the game is that it makes a bad first impression and feels uninviting and untidy, but once you invest some time in it, you feel rewarded and appreciated.
What’s iLL
+ Its fun to play
+ Good environmental variety
+ Solid gameplay and combat mechanics.
What’s not
– Noticeably repetitive
– Looks ugly and badly optimised
– Expensive
Special mention
Game uses Uplay DRM within Steam DRM, with the need to stay online to get uplay to work. This might be a concern for those without a stable internet connection.
