Report #48

Might & Magic X - Legacy is a RPG game from 2014. It's designed in a very oldschool way, evocative of RPGs from the 80s and 90s. You control your party from the ego perspective, moving and fighting on a grid, where each grid-movement equals one tick of time going by. You land on the Agyn Peninsula, where the city of Karthal has been taken by rebels and you get assigned with the task of freeing the city.

Let's get one thing straight right away: I've rarely had such a hard time writing a fitting review for a game as for MMX Legacy. This game does so many things wrong: The story is bland, the dialogues and NPCs even more so. The world feels empty and lifeless, and the textures are quite ugly. Although you get the feeling there is a ton of lore in the game, it's not well presented at all. There is no good fast travel system and you spend so much time just running around to get from A to B. You run into deadly ambushes all the time, which leads to making you save your game almost every 5 minutes. There is no way to tell how strong a enemy is before entering a fight with it, and there are a ton of really strong enemies. Therefore you need to save again before every fight, because there is no way to anticipate the outcome. There are next to no hints or quest markers, and to level up you have to travel to certain characters which are spread all over the world. Remember, there is no real good fast travel system. All this can be extremely frustrating.

And still…somehow the game grew on me after a few hours. I was still annoyed by the aforementioned gameplay "features", but I started to enjoy the other parts. The oldschool puzzles for example, which would give you a riddle and you'd actually type in the answer. Not choose from 4 different possiblities. And once you get used to making notes by yourself, it's actually quite enjoyable to find the next lead to your quest, because it gives you a feeling of accomplishment you wouldn't get by simply following a marker on your map. Combine this with the rather unique game mechanics of moving and fighting on a grid from the first person view and you have a one-of-a-kind gaming experience. (By unique I mean unique for modern games. Apart from Legend of Grimrock 1&2 I can't think of a lot of other games doing this in the last 10-15 years.) I'm not necessarily keen on playing more games like this in the near future, but it did its trick for this one game.

Yeah, I don't know if you can take away anything helpful from the review…And I'm still confused by the game myself. It should be an absolute trainwreck and in many regards it is…but it still somehow worked?

If you follow my reviews you might remember that I started to play the Jedi Knight series a few posts ago. I decided to finish it this month and continued with the 4th part, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, released in 2002. In this mix between a FPS and 3PS you play as Kyle Katarn, known as the protagonist from the first JK games. The games is set a few years after the second Death Star and the New Republic is struggling with the Imperial Remnant. On a routine mission you encounter a powerful Dark Jedi named Dessan and from there on you begin chasing him across the galaxy.

Jedi Outcast is a notably more modern game than its predecessors. It plays much better and the graphics are quite okay even without modding. The story is interesting and you get to fight a lot with your lightsaber. In the prior games I always preferred the blaster over the lightsaber, but in Jedi Outcast the light saber felt finally superior to the other weapons -- as it should be in a game where you play a jedi ;)

But boy, I died soooo many times in this game. Some of the jumping puzzles are incredibly frustrating and hard. Thank god for quicksaving/-loading (again). Many people praise the game for its challenging difficulty, but for me personally it was almost too much to be enjoyable. I struggled a bit with the controls though, to be fair. And while swordplay is vastly superior to the prior games it's only perfected in the sequel Jedi Academy.

All in all, I think this is a great game, definitely playable even 18 years after its release and a must play for all Star Wars fans.

Jedi Academy (2003) is the last part of the Jedi Knight series. You play as a young padawan entering the Jedi Academy and get sent on various missions to inspect the so called Cult of Ragnos. It is very similar to Jedi Outcast, but improved in most aspects: Dialogues are better and there are more of them, level design is more diversified (imho), swordplay is even better and the graphics feel a tad more polished. It also adds some light RPG-style features: Character creation, leveling, something akin to a quest-system, and you can individually modifiy your appearance and light saber. Later on you can even choose between dual lightsabers, double lightsaber and standard lightsaber. I choose to play as a Rodian with dual light sabers and it was great fun! Not that I disliked playing as Kyle Katarn, but you know...this time I was playing as me!

The gameplay is much smoother and the swordplay felt more refined than in Jedi Outcast. This may also be due to the fact, that Academy is much easier than Outcast. In fact, many people seem to complain about the lack of difficulty in Academy. Personally I didn't mind, high difficulty is not necessarily something I look for in games. I had a lot of fun playing this and I think that it is the best game of all the Jedi Knight games. Not by much, but I liked it more than Outcast because of the included RPG elements and the richer dialogues. I admit though, that the final boss fight was kind of underwhelming, especially since it was also the final fight of all the Jedi Knight games.

As before, I can only wholeheartedly recommend this game. I think it's a worthy conclusion to Jedi Knight.