Might & Magic X: Legacy Preview

The folks at the RPG Codex have put out a new preview for Limbic Entertainment’s Might & Magic X: Legacy, and it’s a very positive one to boot. Here’s a sampling:

Compared to earlier Might and Magic games, melee characters are much more interesting. Instead of autoattacking ad nauseam, they can specialize in the Warfare skill, which provides an entire line of melee “spells”, with strikes that taunt an enemy into attacking that character, always hit and ignore blocks, or silence enemy spellcasters. As a result, beefy frontliner characters have a solid niche in MMXL.

Enemy design adds to the mix. In many areas, each new enemy you run into uses a completely different mechanic to challenge your typical approach to combat. Just when you feel like your Ranger with 4 attacks a round is turning into an overpowered death machine, a monster arrives that not only blocks the first few strikes in a round, but gets extra attacks on his round based on how many times he blocked or was missed on your round. An all melee party would be uniformly powerful… until it starts running into the monsters that stun and incapacitate when they attack, suddenly making that spellcaster with a stun immunity spell look quite useful.

Finally, the elephant in the room: monster animations suck. No, I don’t mean aesthetically. The monster art is uniformly good, much of it ported over from the visually impressive Heroes 6. The animations are smooth. The problem is that the animations have no options attached to them. You cannot speed them up. You cannot toggle them to skip once you’ve seen them all a million times. This is further exacerbated by the way your own combat moves work: they all fire instantly, and the animations and special effects do not have to finish before your next character can act. The end result is a quick, ultra satisfying turn on your end, followed by watching the enemy plod through animations you’ve already seen before. If Limbic addresses this fundamental issue, they’ll have one of the best turn-based combat games in recent memory. If they don’t… well, it’ll still be good, but with a sidedish of irritating, and probably not an enduring classic.