Grimrock

It's available today on Gamersgate, Steam and Ubisoft's website

Looks fantastic. Just like Grimrock but turn based. Let's pray it sells really well so we have our Lands of Lore/Eye of the Beholder cravings satisfied by the excellent Grimrock series (long may it live!) and our turn based strategic combat cravings filled with Might & Magic. I want to be 70 years old and awaiting the release of Grimrock 42, and M&M 52

Also another amazing crpg was just released day before yesterday: Blackguards. Its an isometric turn based tactical crpg based on the DAS (dark eye) ruleset, same ruleset the Realms of Arkania games of old were based on (but updated to a newer edition)

Anyhow if anyone here has started playing MMX or will start soon, what party are you starting with? I am considering

-Male Human Crusader
-Female Elven Bladedancer
-M or F Human Freemage
-Either Dwarven Runepriest or something else.

Been playing for about 9 hours now. My overall impression of the game is good.

It doesn't feel as polished as Legend of Grimrock in terms of graphics and UI. It also feels like it holds your hand a little too much when interacting with the environment, which feels less logical and immersive. I like how Grimrock keeps a strong internal logic that simplifies a lot of things, such as food just being items where as in M&M it's a number which caps at 6 for some inexplicable reason.

There's more environmental objects, but the low resolution textures take away from the experience. They made a big blunder with the UI and made it non-scalable, so I have to user a lower resolution than I use in all other games because the game simply won't allow that screen format.

Character customization seems pretty sweet, with lots of races, classes and skills to choose from and level up. Some of the systems should seem familiar if you've played M&M or HOMM games of the past, and you also need to run around the world to find trainers.

Speaking of the world, the scope of the game seems a lot bigger than Grimrock. You have large overland areas as well as dungeons and towns. I think they've done a good job of making believable tile-based environment settings.

So far I haven't encountered any puzzles, which is a shame, as this was a place where Grimrock truly shined. But we'll see. I'm not sure the dungeon crawling engine they've designed here lends itself easily to the type of logical puzzles we see in Grimrock.

Combat is turn-based which makes it a much less frantic experience than in Grimrock. This lets you play more tactically. There also seems to be no way to position your characters such as having your brawlers in the front and your ranged characters in the back. But there's a skill called Warfare that I think lets a character help out his friends when they're being attacked.

What makes the game despite some of the flaws, is that it does capture the essence of many old-school RPGs. Exploring the world, delving into dungeons, returning to town with your loot to buy new equipment and train up your guys, just so you wander off again on another adventure. For me, the game hits the spot right there.

Overall, from what I've seen so far, I can recommend the game if you're into old-school RPGs, despite some of the more dubious technical decisions Ubisoft made.

Thanks for the review, gives me something to think about and consider if I want to make time for it

I'm not satisfied by M&M X, i waited for its release cause i didn't want to play it in beta state and now i'm very disappointed by ubi soft.
They have proven again to me how much they have become the European twin of EA, developing this M&M fast and cheap... using it like a good bait for old school players.

They put on it a very low budget and created hype through the marketing machine, i even thought maybe those were old assets revisited of a M&M which was never released and they just added up some stuff.
Graphics are very bad/old but with some modern lighting effects, UI design is very poor, even the available portraits for characters are a just a bunch (we are lucky those pics are at least drawn good) but UBI is tons of times bigger than Almost Human Ltd.
The game has a good gameplay and feeds players hunger for dungeon crawlers, but it's not what i expected.

I'm sure that Grimrock developers will surprise us much more with their sequel, high quality stuff made by real professionals.

MMx is a terrible game.

Starts of well enough, and I was really enjoying it. But later on in the game you hit on these insane difficulty spikes were your whole party get's one shotted. Later you find that you have done all of the quests that you can actually live through, leaving you no where to go.

This is a game for the hard core or those who know cheats, normal and casual players stay clear.

The comments I've been reading on different gaming forums is that it's a fantastic, but buggy game. The response has been surprisingly overwhelmingly positive on sites like neoGaf.

I have the collector's edition myself, but I haven't started playing yet. Still waiting for patches.

Kaerdak wrote:I'm not satisfied by M&M X, i waited for its release cause i didn't want to play it in beta state and now i'm very disappointed by ubi soft.
They have proven again to me how much they have become the European twin of EA, developing this M&M fast and cheap... using it like a good bait for old school players.

Not exactly. Ubisoft didn't care enough for the project to give it a good budget, but it was a labor of love for the development team. The game got made because there was one person who was a massive fan of the old Might and Magic games, and he pitched for MMX for 3 years: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8895

The only reason why Ubi decided to greenlight the project was because Grimrock was such a success. Just one more thing to like about Almost Human, I guess.

It's clearly a test from Ubisoft to see if there's still any interest in Might and Magic and old-school RPGs, so I'm very much hoping it'll be a success. This could open the opportunity to more sequels, but with more money and development time. Not to mention what it could do to the whole genre if it did. After all, if Grimrock's sales persuaded Ubisoft to make MMX, what could two successful grid-based RPGs do?

It started of very promising, and I couldn't put it down. But later on, after act one, it gets very messy. I keep going back and having another play, but it doesn't hold my attention for very long.

Dandy wrote:It started of very promising, and I couldn't put it down. But later on, after act one, it gets very messy. I keep going back and having another play, but it doesn't hold my attention for very long.

Most are in the opinion the game gets considerably better after act one... But everyone has their own tastes, of course. The Might and Magic style is very different from Dungeon Master/Grimrock.

Panda wrote:

Dandy wrote:It started of very promising, and I couldn't put it down. But later on, after act one, it gets very messy. I keep going back and having another play, but it doesn't hold my attention for very long.

Most are in the opinion the game gets considerably better after act one... But everyone has their own tastes, of course. The Might and Magic style is very different from Dungeon Master/Grimrock.

Grinded my way to act 3, but it's getting harder and harder to force myself to play. Maybe I should just give up.