Might & Magic X: Legacy

Might & Magic X: Legacy is a return to the principles the series grew up on in its earliest entries: step-by-step movement on a square grid, combat that plays out directly in first-person view without switching to a separate screen, and a party of up to six characters that the player assembles from several classes and races, each with their own abilities and skill trees. After years in which the Might and Magic brand was represented mainly by the strategy series Heroes of Might and Magic, Legacy returned to the old-school dungeon crawler genre that the whole series had originally grown out of decades earlier, including an emphasis on manually mapping unknown corridors and the traps waiting around every corner.

The 2014 game was developed by Limbic Entertainment under the Ubisoft publishing label, which had taken over the brand after the collapse of New World Computing and 3DO. The story takes place on the continent of Ashan, which Ubisoft had introduced as the series' new home mythology for Heroes VI, so Legacy also functions as a bridge between the old dungeon crawling and the brand's modern form - the player encounters factions and names familiar from the strategy entries, only this time from the perspective of a wandering party on the ground rather than an army commander on the strategic map. The game was released gradually through a system of episodic updates that progressively added further chapters of the story and new areas to explore, before the complete version with all chapters was merged into a single closed package available in stores. This gradual release, together with the return to grid-based movement, clearly sets Legacy apart from the rest of the series' modern output and makes it the one major attempt to bring old-school Might and Magic into the post-2010 era.

Why play it: Legacy is for players who grew up on the old Might and Magic entries or similar grid-based dungeon crawlers and want the same feeling of slow exploration and tactical combat in a more up-to-date technical package.