Pros: A new story, new character types, detailed role-playing.
Cons: Dated engine, poor realism, poor game balance.
The Bottom Line: This should have been an expansion pack. I recommend it to the average role-playing gamer, particularly if you liked the others in this series. Do not have high expectations.
apoeze's Full Review: Might and Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer for Window...
Background
I could be fairly described as a hardcore role-playing gamer. I prefer role-playing games (RPGs) that are heavy on detail and consider the playing of an actual role very important in these games. I don’t mind one way or the about statistics and numbers in the game but want realism as much as possible. I guess the keyword here is immersion. I want to feel like the paladin fighting for justice as much as is possible. My favourite RPG types are classic fantasy but I’ll give anything a go.
I have not played Might and Magic 1 through to 5 but have played 6 through to 8. Yes this is one looong series here.
Performance
The minimum requirements are very modest though a Pentium 166 and 32MB RAM is needed. No 3D card is required though the game benefits from one. The game had slight jerkiness on my system though this was from the engine, not the requirements.
I did not note any major bugs in the game but had one or two problems with quest triggering.
The Game
Might and Magic VIII – Day of the Destroyer is a fantasy role-playing game where most things occur in real time but the combat occurs in a turn-based mode although you can do it in real time too if you wish. It is a moderately detailed game world, which is enormous and broken into regions. This time the game also includes the elemental planes of earth, air fire and water.
This game comes on two disks and installation of the game was simple and without problems.
Your party can contain as many as 5 characters, which is one more than the Might and Magic 6 and 7. However this time only one is created at the beginning of the game and the others will have to join you later. No creation of the entire party here. There are 8 classes that your characters can be though your initial one may not be a dragon. The eight classes are quite varied and include the usual knight, cleric and necromancer but new to this series as well as most role-playing games, are the troll, minotaur, vampire, dark elf and dragon. There are no selectable races as such for this game since the classes determine the races. Your character can also be promoted with benefits during the game, eg dragon to great wyrm.
There is a single very linear storyline of the usual save the world type, which is told primarily through those non-party characters (NPCs) who give you quests to do. It is a good story but it is badly told. One quest, for instance, involves you risking your neck for corrupt dark elf (read evil) merchants. Hardly.
Graphics
This games graphics are very dated. The game engine used is the same one as in Might and Magic 6 and 7 and is really quite old now. I might also point out I wasn’t that impressed with it in Might and Magic 6 when it was considered new. It has been updated a little and runs smoother and has some 3D graphical support. The game world design is OK with a few decent dungeons like the minotaur home but the graphical quality throughout the game sometimes feels as old as Doom 2. There’s pixelation and glitches and washed out colours galore. The objects in the game look higher quality than the ground so this stands out like a sore thumb. The enemies are similar and just look like coloured blobs from a distance but aren’t too bad up close. Picking on the graphics is easy but I’ll round it up by saying the graphical game engine is old and needs complete re-writing, not just updating. Indeed this single fact has been screamed at 3DO by thousands of fans that have thus far been utterly ignored.
The spell effects are a little similar being OK and yet not quite good enough. As an example the fireball explodes as a perfect hemisphere. Realistic? No.
The final scene was sub par but I found the introductory scene fairly good.
Overall I found the graphics rather average.
Sound
The music and sound effects are OK but also sound outdated. After the music in Heroes of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (which was excellent), I could never see this music as being good.
The speech acting was very good considering the low quality lines the actors had to work with. I was unfortunate enough to choose one character voice, which I could only fairly describe as a bimbo. Oh sure, some guys out there would love a bimbo in their party but the comments… the giggles.. the airy remarks. It’s enough to make you scream.. or at least ditch the character like I did. To make it even more odd, this character had high ‘intellect’.
Gameplay
Gameplay is good but also suffers from the recycled game engine and if you’ve played either Might and Magic 6 or 7 you’ve seen it all before. Character development is good with plenty of skills as well as a possible promotion to your class being attainable. One weakness is that the statistics like strength can go up to 255. This is incidentally mathematically and computer based rather than based on what would be a good range easily understood by the human mind that us gamers use. As well as that, the difference from 2 to 10 is much greater than from 155 to 255, which doesn’t seem right at all.
The quests are nothing special as are the sub quests. They are all of the ‘fed-ex’ type, requiring far too much running around delivering/collecting things etc.
While the game has its problems, it does cover just about every aspect of role-player gaming. There’s journals and maps and traps and potions etc all of which are not actually badly done and each one has a reasonable level of detail as well. The game also includes flight, which I must admit makes the graphics seem a lot nicer. There are plenty of role-playing games that neglect this simple valuable addition.
I found the combat a little boring. One of the reasons is the poor game balance I’ll describe later. The other is the weak AI. One redeeming feature though is sometimes opposing groups may combat each other and often one side will be your allies. It’s nice to have people on your side for a change.
I have a lot of realism gripes with the game. The items dropped by a dead monster are not fitting. Rats and other low life forms will often drop gold, which is just barmy. Dragons might drop a suit of armour etc but would these have fit the dragon?
The monsters also disappear instantly upon you examining the body for treasure. And the manual mentions the convenient disappearance is due to the body fulfilling its last obligation to the living. Pathetic.
Each region regenerates all allies and monsters every six months of game time. The ship and horse transport services only ever tell you when you can go at the time, never the actual schedule so you can plan ahead. There are a lot of these minor issues and while I’ll admit many games of any type have them, this game has too many and it seriously detracts from the realism and immersion of the game.
The might and magic balance is bad. Makes you wonder about the title doesn’t it? Might is always weaker than magic in the game unless you run out of spell points. By the end of the game your knights are really along for the show. A much bigger game balance issue are the various classes. We all knew having dragons in a party would be a risky game-balance issue and I’m here to tell you they are indeed grossly overpowered. They bump off everything with ease and have good skills such that getting a dragon in your party early makes for a dead cinch of a game. Not only that, the other classes are also imbalanced. The vampires skills and spells are rather poor but the dark elf is quite a nasty piece of work, second only to the dragon in power. 3DO obviously didn’t bother with game balance much.
More powerful monster versions are quasi-cloned from monster types with marginally different graphics and higher stats as well as a ‘stronger’ sounding name. For example, there’s a walking dead and a zombie.
The computer AI is thick with the monsters never using any kind of real intelligence. They always run straight for you and attack and get confused if something’s in the way. I polished off dozens of trolls across a river this way. They simply don’t notice the bridge.
There’s just one last thing I would like to mention. This game just has to throw in aliens invading from outer space. I’m not kidding. At least in this game there’s not a laser pistol or Star Ship Enterprise in sight. And I’m mighty glad of that. However it is there. I’m not adverse to space games and might even like a space-fantasy mix but I hate a change from pure fantasy to the sudden addition of cybernetics.
Multiplayer
There is no multiplayer capability in this game.
Comparisons
Virtually a copy of its predecessors Might and Magic 6 and 7.
Info Line: 415-503-9089 Email: sales [at] tekgems.com MIGHT AND MAGIC 8 - DAY OF DESTROYER view larger image Description UPC: 5037999006701 Unit Weigh...More at eBay
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