Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor is the latest in a long series of Might and Magic titles that reach back to the heyday of 8-bit computer RPGs. I'm going to be honest and tell you that I wasn't a big fan of this series. They generally had an "everything goes" plot that was at disjointed and flimsy. MM7 continues this dubious tradition.

Performance:

MM7 is listed as requiring a P133, and recommending a P200 with 3D accelerator card. On a P166 with a Banshee-based card, I found that performance did not suffer in the least. I suspect that a P133 would be more than adequate. MM7 doesn't even approach the current standards of 3D gaming, let alone push any envelopes, so the most a 3D card will add to this game will be a slight performance increase, fog effects, and colored lighting.

I found load times when travelling from map area to map area to be excessive. As is to be expected, the game performed slightly better in fullscreen than in windowed mode. I found it particularly annoying that MM7 doesn't allow you to change from one mode to another in the middle of a game.

The game was stable in my experience with one rather persistent exception. The only time MM7 crashed was once in about every five times I started a game of ArcoMage (described below). Make a habit of saving before you enter a tavern for a game, and save anything you might be doing in other applications.

Graphics:

There are three sets of graphics worth commenting on: the 3D engine, the 2D static graphics (interface, building backdrops, etc), and the 2D monster sprites.

Of the three of these, the 2D static graphics are the only that are well done. While they aren't groundbreaking, they're done well and are attractive.

The 3D engine and the 2D sprites, on the other hand, is what you're going to notice the most. The 3D engine is quite honestly the ugliest I've seen in years. Think "Doom" with optional colored lighting and fog/mist effects. It is slightly more 3D than Doom - call it 2.75-D, but nothing approaching the 3D complexity of even a basic Quake level. The textures are extremely small, resulting in repeating patterns that are wholly unappealing to look at. Most of the town buildings are boring square boxes, and the terrain is jaggy and inexcusably amateurish. It's typical to encounter nearly vertical mountains and plateaus that look like giant upturned Tupperware.

The 2D monster sprites are atrocious. There are a couple dozen basic monster classes, and individual monsters within that class use the same sprites, though colored differently, sometimes. The only apparent difference between a red dragon and a green dragon is - you guessed it - one is completely red, and the other is completely green. The overall style of the 3D engine and monster sprites is that of Duke Nuke'm - a game I thought was hideously ugly even when it came out. Sprites (including the trees) that look the same as I pivot around them completely ruin the point of having a 3D engine.

Setting:

The setting for Might and Magic VII is miserable and generic. Humans, elves, and dwarves are all present - between the player classes and the monsters, you've got your basic Tolkien/D&D/classical mythology bestiary.

There are four available races - the above three and goblins, which pretty much look like female green elves or green guys with bad teeth. I went for a racially balanced party, which, in the end, doesn't amount to anything because character race in Might and Magic 7 is just window dressing...

...which brings me to the part about this game that made my teeth grate. I had to re-start this game once. Not because I wasn't happy with the starting abilities or class limitations of my characters. Not because I bit off more than I could chew and found myself wishing I had made different choices early on. I had to re-start because the original male elf character I chose had such horrible voice acting that hearing him speak made me want to hurt people, bad. On the other hand, any of you who really thought Snarf from the Thundercats had a terrific voice are in for a real treat. At its best, the voice acting is merely adequate and cliched, and overused. Hearing the witty repartee between your characters and a shopkeeper from whom they've decided not to buy anything from will make you laugh the first time, possibly smirk the second. By the time you've heard it a hundred or more times, you just wish they'd shut up. I couldn't get myself to turn off the voices because I kept hoping that they would be used for something other than repetitive canned comments. I should have known better. One of my characters' responses to rude shopkeepers was an indignant "Well, I never!" About the third time I heard it (and every time after), I would think to myself "Yeah you do, every time. Shut up!"

The setting as a whole is dull and uninspired. Humans live in Medieval style villages, elves in little tree forts and tents, dwarves underground, et cetera. No surprises there. The monster selection has a very AD&D "Monster Manual" feel to it, and this impression is strengthened by the fact that the art it shows you when bringing up a new overground area has so much in common with the art on the first edition of that book. Very early on in playing the game, I found myself skipping long texts and just scanning for keywords. That's a sign that I don't really care about the setting because the game has failed to make me care. Erathia is just a hodge-podge of interchangeable towns with interchangeable place names in a fantasy setting that fails to distinguish itself in any way from what one could expect in typical pulp fantasy novels.

Eventually, the setting gets "different", but not much better. Instead of being stuck in cookie cutter villages that are visually reminiscent of The Bard's Tale (a great game, but it's 1999, let's get the engines looking a bit better), later on in the game, you are stuck in a cliché heaven/hell metaphor. Cheesy religious imagery abounds on either end - apparently Christ made it to Erathia on his 1029 tour. As you progress, the scale gets larger. I'd say "grander", but that implies so much that isn't there. Instead of cities with Lego-style buildings, you wander around in a good/evil style city where the walls appear to be 100' tall or more, and angels/devils abound. Interesting concept, but given the tiny size and blandness of the textures, the net effect is taking the makings of a great candy-decorated gingerbread house, and using the same amount of frosting and goodies to decorate a house 10 times its size.

As if the out-of-place religious inclusions weren't enough, near the end of the game, you become skilled in a weapon called the "blaster", which is right out of a Buck Rogers plot. I like cross-genre plotlines in games only when they're done well and make sense. In this case, neither applies.

The final quest contained some of the more visually appealing levels, but the ending of the game itself was rather forgettable. Without spoiling it, it is rather uninspired. If you read fantasy novels, you've seen this ending at least once. If you read cheesy fantasy novels, you've seen it dozens of times.

Gameplay:

MM7 is a single-player game. You can save at any time; in addition, an autosave feature will save your game any time you switch from one location (city, dungeon, tower, ets) to another.

Gameplay is adequately balanced, if repetitive. After you reach a certain level of power, you will find the random monsters wandering around on the surface to be annoyances at best. Scaling the difficulty of some of the random monsters to the party's relative power would have been a nice touch.

I've always been a big fan of trying to build up my party before getting knee-deep in quests - I skimmed the surface of the quests until my characters were able to defend themselves to my satisfaction. MM7's very open-ended quest engine doesn't adapt to this style of play very well. While some quests were very difficult and had to be put off until my party had advanced some more, other "introductory" quests were so unchallenging that completing them was a bore. Again, the engine should take into account the relative strength of the party and beef up the simpler encounters (but not diminish the harder encounters) to make stumbling upon an "easy" quest you missed before more satisfying.

The leveling system is something you're either going to like a lot or really become annoyed with. I've always had a soft spot for CRPGs that had a lot of different attribute and skill values, so this aspect of the game worked for me to a degree. MM7 has a mix of a level system, a skill system, and a "merit" system. You get experience points by killing monsters and completing quests, which allow you to increase in level. You go to the training halls to advance in level once you have sufficient experience points, and are granted skill points along with your level. You allot these skill points to various proficiencies, and build them up over time. You then seek out a trainer specific to that skill once you have met certain benchmarks, such as a total skill level for that proficiency. Class limitations and titles achieved by quests also affect your ability to move up in proficiency levels, of which you can work up to Expert, Master, and Grandmaster. I did find the "merit" system to be far too cumbersome, as I often had to wander around looking for houses that I may have missed. Eventually, I grew accustomed to the system, but of the three-tiered process of character development, this was the only one I found to be annoying.

Many of the 8-bit classic CRPGs of the 1980s had the concept of "a game within a game". MM7, much like last year's Baldur's Gate, tips the hat to this time-tested concept. Unlike Baldur's Gate's sub-games (which consisted of several gambling events), Might and Magic VII's sub-game is actually fun. I assume it's a very basic take on the whole Magic: The Gathering card game concept which has spawned more clones than your average sheep-crazed genetic researcher. I say "assume" because I've never actually played M:TG, but MM7's "ArcoMage" seems vaguely similar in style to what little I've read. By the time I found an ArcoMage deck, the money I won from playing the game wasn't enough to make me want to play for financial gain. Instead, I just played it for fun, and to try to get the ArcoMage Champion title. Vastly unlike Baldur's Gate's sub-games in the respect that ArcoMage is actually entertaining.

One part of the gameplay engine that is particularly annoying is the NPC code. If you come up to an NPC, it stops. It then waits for you to say something or to back off. In open areas like most cities, this isn't too bothersome. In cramped, underground locations like Dwarven cities, you're constantly having to back up and turn to try to get way from these NPC stoplights. I find it baffling that the developers could playtest this engine themselves without becoming so annoyed at this that they'd code it differently. I find it unacceptable that the game actually shipped with it that way.

Conclusion

Everything that was originally interesting about this game quickly became tedious - except ArcoMage. Rather than pile quest after bland quest upon an engine so painful to look at, New World Computing might want to consider retiring the Might and Magic series. It was bad before, and it's bad now. Give me a sequel to ArcoMage instead, which is the only reason MM7 deserves the one star it will get.



Recommended: No