Potentially controversial opinion time: I don’t like Might and Magic:Legacy very much.

That I ended up not liking it surprised me as much as anyone else. Legend of Grimrock came out a couple of years ago and did the first-person tile-based dungeon-crawler thing (gosh, that’s a lot of hyphens) very well, successfully proving that this unashamedly old-school concept could work when resuscitated and being given a fresh coat of paint. This Might and Magic reboot is shooting for the same goal, albeit with a different approach: where Grimrock focused on puzzles and exploration in a single massive dungeon, Might and Magic prefers to do pseudo open-world gameplay in an outside environment populated with monsters and dungeons. There’s barely any puzzles in the game and the ones that are present are extremely easy¹, and so the focus shifts onto the game’s combat. Fortunately for Might and Magic its turn-based combat system is leaps and bounds ahead of Grimrock’s real time safety dance. Unfortunately for Might and Magic everything else that feeds into the stock RPG combat loop is not so much broken as it is dated by about twenty years.

This is – in my opinion, anyway – Might and Magic’s greatest failing: it’s attempting to resurrect an ancient gameplay concept, just like Grimrock, but its approach is to slavishly copy every single feature and mechanic that went into that old concept in the hope that having a perfect replica will lead to a repeat of the original’s success. It’s only because this particular offshoot of the genre has been utterly abandoned for a decade or so that Might and Magic gets by at all on novelty value; I like a lot of the things it does purely because I haven’t seen them done in quite this way before. I wasn’t sure how well the tile-based approach would work in an outside environment but it’s actually pretty effective. Everything is abstracted and scaled down so that towns are only fifty-odd squares apart, but the crucial sense of exploration and place that the first-person perspective provides is very much intact and the map designers have been quite good at sprinkling secrets and points of interest around the place. There are monsters that can be seen lurking in the distance and if you want you can go over and fight them, even if you’re ten-odd levels below them and get murdered horribly. Might and Magic does put some scripted blocks on your progress during the first act, but once you’re done with that the only limit to your exploration is your ability to cope with the enemies you’ll encounter along the way. But about that…

…yeah. This is where Might and Magic’s low-budget nature catches up with it.  It’s not bad-looking and aside from some horrifying pop-in when wondering around the world map it runs decently, but the only reason it looks even half as good as it does is because of its wholesale theft of assets from Heroes of Might & Magic/Dark Messiah. Building and animating characters is clearly not one of the developer’s strong suits (as evidenced by there being very few original models in the game) and so I wouldn’t normally begrudge them filling in this gap by purloining stuff from other titles in the series. However, because they’re basically stuck with what’s in those games with no way to really change it themselves Might and Magic ends up reusing models a hell of a lot. Like, a hell of a lot. To the point where there’s often two or three of Leanna standing around in a given town. I can let that go because town residents are nearly all generic NPCs anyway – and the ones that aren’t get a nice hand-drawn portrait when you’re talking to them to distinguish them from everyone else – but when it comes to the monsters and enemies you fight this constant reuse of assets is nigh unforgivable.

Here is the problem. During Act One of the game you fight milita and rogue mages, which use the militia and rogue mage models. Then later on you’re supposed to fight militia captains and elite rogue mages, which use the militia and rogue mage models. After this you fight blackguards and dark sorcerers, which use the militia and rogue mage models (albeit painted black). It’s a similar story with spiders, ghosts and undead; there’s almost no way to distinguish between the easy version of the enemy you’ve been slicing through for the last hour and the ubercharged version that’ll often one-shot your spellcasters, making it impossible to gauge how difficult a given combat encounter is going to be without physically going up to an enemy and letting it punch you in the face. Combine this with a difficulty curve that’s absolutely merciless, even on the easiest difficulty setting, and you have a game where you quicksave and quickload a hell of a lot. Any given fight will often take at least two or three tries to finish, even if you use cheesy tactics like backing into a corridor and making enemies come at you in single file.  Might and Magic is the most trial-and-error game I’ve played in quite some time, and not in a good way.

Anyway, about that RPG combat loop I mentioned earlier. The way RPGs have done it since the dawn of time is:

1)      Fight enemy.

2)      Kill enemy.

3)      Get XP and loot

4)      Repeat steps 1-3 until you can level up and buy bigger weapons.

5)      Repeat steps 1-4 with a bigger enemy.

Now, the big problem RPGs have is that step 1 is only partially dependent on how skilled the player is. Their character’s maximum power level is built into the system by design; the core mechanic of the game is focused around killing small things until you can increase that power level and take on progressively bigger things. If you aren’t high enough level to kill a given monster then all the buffs and consumables and lucky combat rolls in the world aren’t going to help you. If it’s beyond your capability to kill it then you’re best off leaving and coming back later when you’re higher level. It’s a fairly straightforward mechanic, so much so that games like Diablo base themselves entirely around it with great success, but the catch is that there needs to be some sort of safety valve in case a player isn’t very good at the game, builds their party suboptimally or otherwise reaches a point in the game’s storyline where they’re blocked from progressing further by the level difference between their characters and the monsters they’re facing.

Said safety valve is a very simple one, albeit one which has been adopted and abused by just about every other genre under the sun these days: grind. By always giving the player the option to kill crappy low-level enemies you ensure they will never get themselves into a position where they’re stuck with no chance of continuing further into the storyline. It might not be much fun for the player, but making an already existing element of the game repeatable in this manner is an incredibly simple fix to a very serious design flaw. If a player can grind their level up they can eventually overcome any shortcomings they might have in personal skill or party compositions through their sheer power.

I don’t usually spend a paragraph and a half of my reviews outlining game mechanics so fundamental I thought that their existence was pretty much taken for granted these days, but you can probably guess why I’m mentioning it: Might and Magic doesn’t have any respawning enemies, and hence no grind. If you don’t include a self-correcting mechanic like grind then you have to absolutely nail your game balance so that players progress through the game in exactly the way that the designers intend with no room for error – except because the people playing your game are going to be squishy, fallible human beings who will do extremely strange and unexpected things when faced with your apparently perfectly-pitched game experience², there is going to be an awful lot of error. Taken in conjunction with the punishing difficulty curve – which is balanced towards players who know how to build their parties and who are making full use of spells, consumables and buffs – it’s all too easy to get stuck in Might and Magic with no apparent way of beating a tough encounter. There were too many occasions where I’d get destroyed in two hits by some innocuous-looking enemy and wonder if I’d somehow missed an area somewhere, since this was the only way I could account for my party’s apparent low level. There’s also no character respec, meaning that if you do build your party suboptimally – and while Might and Magic does have an excellent system built around dumping points into a myriad of passive skills, because there’s so much choice it’s very easy to put points into the wrong thing – there’s no way to get yourself out of that particular hole.

It’s this hole that I’ve found myself irretreviably stuck in after fifteen hours of battering my way through unwinnable fight after unwinnable fight. It’s not that they’re truly unwinnable, you see. The one I’m stuck on right now, I imagine that if I went to a merchant and bought a bunch of Scrolls of Water Protection I could probably scrape through it by the skin of my teeth, but after going through this crap for the tenth time in a row – where I had no real idea what would be needed to win the fight before I actually started it – I’ve completely lost interest in continuing further into the game. I’ve run out of smaller monsters to kill. My initial class choices turned out to be distinctly underpowered; ranged weapons are practically useless so the Ranger had to be converted into a crippled dagger-wielder (after I put about 15 points into the Bow skill), while the Orc Barbarian’s class bonus and two-handed weapon bonus are bugged and do not work. The Rune Priest’s Fire Magic dragged me this far into the game, but I’ve started to run into enemies with significant amounts of fire resistance and he doesn’t have any other magic that’s really worth a damn. My party is underpowered and apparently underlevelled; every fight is frustratingly hard now, and that frustration has grown to the point where I’d rather go and play something else than continue on with Might and Magic: Legacy. I’m hardly a lightweight gamer, so my assessment is that if a game has let me get into this position of being so irrevocably stuck that my only option is to restart the whole thing – and let us remember that Might and Magic is not a short game, and that I was two-thirds of the way through it – then that game is fundamentally flawed in terms of design. I’m not saying that you’ll definitely fall into this pit too if you play it, but the risk is there; Might and Magic is a game that has no compunctions about wasting my time, at least, and my time is far too valuable to waste these days. So I’m moving on. So long, Might and Magic. You had (or resurrected) several good ideas, but I really don’t think you had to bring the bad ones along as well.

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No recent game has enraged me more than Clash of Heroes. This is unfortunate because the core of it is actually very good; it’s just mired in one of the single worst metagames I can remember.

Clash of Heroes is a Puzzle Quest-alike (hey, remember that game? I do my best not to) whose unique selling point is that it doesn’t use a variation of Bejeweled’s match-three mechanic for its puzzle element. Instead it has something new – something original – which… okay, it involves matching three colours, but that particular paradigm has undergone such rampant mutation in CoH that it’s not at all recognisable as a Bejeweled descendent. The premise of it is that you’ve got two opposing armies made up of a grid of differently coloured unit types facing each other on a battlefield. You are the hero commanding one of these two armies. There are two move types you can make, and two only: you can either move the unit at the bottom of one column to the bottom of another column, or else you can remove a unit from anywhere in a grid. Using only these two action types (of which you get a base three per turn) your job is to match up either a column or a row of three units of the same type and colour.

Still sounds like Bejeweled, right? Well, that’s where the similarity ends, because Clash has far more in common with Magic: The Gathering than it does Bejeweled. When you match a column of three units the column doesn’t disappear or score points or anything like that. Instead the column will become “locked” – completely immovable – and a timer will appear next to it that counts down every turn. Once the timer reaches zero (and if the column is still alive) it will unleash an attack which batters through the opposing army’s ranks. If the attack gets to the back row of the enemy army then it will do the remainder of its damage directly to the enemy hero. You win by killing the enemy hero.

It’s fairly cut and dried stuff, but fortunately for CoH there’s a very deep system of mechanical finesse involved in how you construct your attacks. Matching a row of three merges units into a protective wall, which immediately moves the wall to the front rank of the army. This shunts other units backwards, and this movement can match other sets of three; matching two or more sets of three in a single move will get you bonus moves. Having a group of attacks of the same colour trigger on the same turn will “link” those attacks, giving them a boost to their attack power. Similarly managing to match a column of six units of the same type (and given that there is only room for six units in any given column this is quite difficult) will result in a single massively boosted attack that will inflict horrific damage on your opponent.

The variety and complexity of the moves you can make is therefore vastly increased, and the gameplay is expanded further by the different types of units available. The basic units are all much the same, with some attacking quicker but doing less damage and some vice versa, but they’re mainly for boosting other attacks and wearing down your opponent’s defences. The real hurt is dished out by your Elite and Champion units; these are units which take up two or four spaces on the grid (making it harder to construct an attacking combination around them) and which take anywhere from four to six turns to charge up their attack, but which hit like trucks when they finally do strike and which can often one-shot the opposing hero. Of course they get their own Elite and Champion units, and when they set up an attack with one your priority switches to building a giant wall in front of this super-unit and inflicting as much damage on it as possible (inflicted damage is deducted from the attack power of a charging unit) before it takes you out.

Everything in the puzzle part of Clash of Heroes is admirably well-thought out; the units, colours and moves all mesh together to produce something that is very tactically slick. If the puzzle was all Clash was I would probably like it a lot more than I actually do; if it were just a series of increasingly difficult challenges with multiplayer and time trials and so on it would have been a far easier game to swallow. Sadly these parts of the game are vestigial at best and the real meat of Clash is to be found in its campaign mode, which is utterly rancid.

The campaign storyline is predictably awful so I won’t go into that, but mechanically speaking they couldn’t have made something better calculated to irritate the crap out of me if they’d tried. In the campaign you progress along a series of nodes which form a path. Every so often there is a baddie on one of the nodes on this path, and you fight. There are chests full of money scattered around; these are essentially worthless because money can only be used to restock your supply of Elite and Champion units, which hardly ever die unless you’re being spectacularly careless. The path occasionally branches and you get to fight an optional baddie, but even this shallow attempt at non-linearity is utterly sabotaged by the levelling mechanic.

You see, your ability to win the battles – and thus your ability to progress – in Clash’s campaign has absolutely bugger all to do with how good you are at shifting units around. Instead it’s entirely dependent on how high a level you and your units have. A higher level means more HP and more damage, and the baddies are tuned so that you have to be at level X to have a real chance of beating them. If you’re underleveled then your attacks will be completely blunted on the tough enemy units, any damage that does make it through to the back row will take off a laughably low sliver of health, and once your opponent manages to make an attack it’ll probably take off half (or more) of your health since your hero’s max HP is tiny. This makes the campaign completely devoid of any kind of interesting challenge; either you are a high enough level to beat the enemy, in which case it will be almost embarrassingly easy, or else you are underlevelled and will be crushed repeatedly until you’ve ground out some more XP.

With this one stroke the levelling mechanic completely undoes the good work that went into the design of the puzzle game. I’d go so far as to say Clash of Heroes doesn’t just have a difficulty curve that’s badly-tuned; it rather has no difficulty curve, instead preferring to turn battles into a binary outcome that has nothing to do with how good you are at the game. There is a definite order to the battles, and if you do them in the correct order you will win them all. Attempt to deviate from this ordered progression and you’ll end up screaming at your computer monitor in short order because the game doesn’t give a fuck that what you are trying to do is pretty much impossible; it has no compunction about using its superior units to crush you mercilessly. It’s a “difficulty” mechanic which is often used in strategy games, but Clash isn’t a strategy game. It’s a puzzle game, and no matter the mechanical complexity the fact is that the basic scope of puzzle games is far, far too limited for Clash to get away with taking the same approach.

Playing the campaign is thus just a matter of going through the prescribed motions and there’s nothing else there to make me want to play it. Maybe this sort of thing appeals to some people. I don’t know. I play WoW on and off so I can’t really point fingers at people who enjoy what I perceive to be pointless, grindy activities. All I know is that once my enchantment with how well-designed the puzzle part was wore off (which was about halfway through the second chapter) I hated every second I spent in the campaign. It was just a series of repetitive battles that were either far too easy or far too hard. So be warned; there’s the seed of a good game in here, but the campaign smothers it in the choking effluent of lazy design and aside from a quick battle mode there’s no other single-player options. If you want your money’s worth from Clash of Heroes you’d better know someone else who owns it as well and who wants to play multiplayer. Otherwise you’re in for a dreadful time. A real shame.

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