Now that "Ubisoft Connect" is required to play this game, I won't be playing it anymore.

Go to he1111 in a handbasket, Ubisoft.

In MM X: Legacy, we got a new installment in the venerable Might & Magic franchise. This series is next only to the Wizardry and Ultima franchises regarding how much, and for how long, it helped define computer RPGs. It has survived several generations of players and hardware... for good reason, because it pioneered first person adventuring for players craving, at the time, for a D&D style experience for their 8 and 16 bit computers; and it did so, on one hand, while innovating through a streamlined, but fast paced and fun style of gameplay featuring battles against large numbers of monsters... on the other hand, a game world written very tongue-in-cheek, mixing Tolkien fantasy with sci-fi elements, even breaking the "fourth wall" at times. Although the franchise is no longer in the hands of its original creator, older and retro gamers remain very faithful to this day to the original series and its "Heroes" spin off; sometimes overly, zealously so. Is this work by Limbic/Ubisoft being fairly or unfairly criticized by some of the decades long fans of New World Computing? Let's see.

MM X: Legacy starts very similar to the early games in the franchise, with tile-based movement mechanics instead of the seamless 3D movement featured in more recent titles. Your party of four adventurers (plus two recruitable NPCs giving passive bonuses) are new arrivals on the city of Sorpigal, where they'll take their first steps into adventure. The thing which players will soon notice while moving around the city, is that movement feels, or looks, a bit unnatural because the environments and architecture are more about aesthetics and realism, and not so much about them being designed, specifically, for tile based movement. In the classic games, buildings and interesting locations were placed very close together. Here, the empty space feels a bit larger in surface, or has more visual depth than there really should be for a game like this. As a result, your subconscious will keep wishing that there were free form movement inside cities and in wild areas, but there's none; tile movement feels visually constraining in this game for this reason. Fortunately, in dungeons, this architecture problem is reduced and the game has a more compact, classic visual design.

The game world, filled with bits of written and spoken lore, is shared with Ubisoft own "Heroes of Might & Magic" releases. While it is quite detailed, I think it takes itself more seriously than it really should considering the franchise traditions. There's little remaining from the humoristic tones of the original series. Worse still, the sci-fi elements characteristic of the original series are, sadly, gone. What remains is a very plain, "tolkienesque" game world which usually contains more detail precisely in those parts where it is less interesting. This is a common feature of all generic, cookie-cutted, modern era "fantasy" settings... perhaps influenced by DEI, and other, similar, pre-made corporate guidelines which are given priority over the work of the writers themselves. Pushing too hard for not offending anyone trying to find reasons to feel offended in the first place, is a creative mistake. Angry modern moods in society tend to be enemies of surprise, and that includes everything that depends on it, including humor - even humor of the most innocent, harmless variety, because even that could offend somebody by accident. Perhaps this is the reason that in M&M X lore, any humoristic sub-text, somewhat preemptively, was hollowed out by the writers... just to make it "safe". The whole package and presentation feels a bit too serious and too creatively stale for me, a bit soul-less to be frank... far away from the cheerful, uncomplicated, straightforward and carefully handcrated games of the past. It doesn't help that there seems to be a constant anti-religion bias within the story which, even as an atheist myself, I consider unnecessary.

Music and sound are nothing special either. There's the ocassional voice acting from your four companions, but the delivery is cringe worthy at times; lowering the volume of the voices is strongly recommended. Some of the missing humor does tend to appear here, in party dialogue, although the lines lean to the crass and the really silly. I'm missing somewhat higher production values and polish in other areas too: for instance, there's time flow, and night time. Yet none of the stores and services actually close at night, and hard working NPCs never go to sleep. Details like this break the player's immersion, and its hard to understand why they're still there after the game's release: as most stores are behind doors, it would've been very easy to implement.

At this point, this entry has so many downsides that it surely seems like a flop just begging to be skipped. Actually, not even close. Because you see... MM X does have a saving grace: one of the best designed gameplay systems I've found as of late. Its turn based battles are a joy, featuring a strategic depth that I don't remember seeing in any of the previous games of the franchise either. The combat is challenging, but never frustrating. It rewards players able to combine the different skills and spells of the party in creative ways. Every encounter is unique, a problem to be solved by your team of adventurers. And to succeed, you'll need to constantly control not only the individual monsters, but also the terrain between them and you. Its fun, rewarding and addictive. Combined with an interesting loot and progression systems, I'd even say this is the best combat mechanics of the entire series.

Overall, despite its faults, I recommend MM X: Legacy. Mainly because it more than delivers where it matters the most, its gameplay, which I'd place even above the other modern classics in this RPG subgenre, like "Legend of Grimrock". It could've been a M&M game for the ages if only it had decided to keep the wacky sci-fi elements, the humor and the hand drawn graphics from the classic entries. As it is, Legacy is a fantastic game to actually play, and even re-play. Its just that, without the elements that are missing from the original formula, it probably won't be remembered with the same amounts of love and nostalgia once you're finished with it.