Might and Magic 9

Let’s be honest about this, the last game in this series was so completely awful you would think New World Computing would just have given up and stuck with what it knows best but it has come back for another crack of the whip, and sure enough, this time around it has actually managed to do a fairly decent job. The horrible interface and dire graphics that plagued Might And Magic VIII have both been ditched and replaced with a smoother more friendly interface and a brand new full 3D engine. The Lithtech graphics engine may be getting on a bit now, but it certainly makes a huge difference to a series that has traditionally sported the worst graphics currently available. Improvements in general gameplay are evident also, with a more subtle and tactical approach to combat. The game can be played in real-time, but you will die very quickly if you don’t press enter to pause the game and play out the action in turn-based fashion. This is the first example of this we’ve seen that works well in a first-person RPG. The class system works well, too. Choosing initially from just a fighter or magic user, your characters can take different paths as they level up and choose different classes according to how you want your party to develop. Of course, it’s not perfect.

Old Habits Die Hard

The character and NPC graphics and animations still look pretty damn awful, some of the conversational text is nonsense, there are too many rooms in the game that serve no purpose, and when your characters gain levels they don’t automatically 'level up’, you still have to go to a trainer in a town and pay for the levels you have already earned in the battle field, but for all this there’s still an enjoyable game to be found here. Might And Magic IX is one of those games that draws you back to it time and again without you really knowing why. Maybe it’s the clever design of certain levels, or the feeling that you are in a very big and real game world, or the multitude of quests and simple but effective class advancement system. Whatever the reason, for the first time Might And Magic has done more things right than it has done wrong, and that can never be a bad thing.