I remember looking forward to the release of this when it first came out because I'd been a fan of the Might & Magic games since Might & Magic III was released and it became my first M&M game. Unfortunately due to some bad business decisions in trying to get into the console gaming market with their own console and milking the Army Men IP to death, they'd ended up bankrupting the company. They couldn't even finish M&M 9 properly despite the New World Computing founder and developer Jon Van Canegham sinking $1 million of his own funds in trying to complete it. 3DO literally shipped Might & Magic IX the same day they filed for bankruptcy and laid off everyone despite that it was clearly unfinished and had game-breaking bugs. It is only through the die-hard Might & Magic fan community that the game even became playable. Unfortunately there was only so much they could do without having the actual game code. It is extremely unfortunate that Ubisoft picked up the M&M franchise and then only ever released Heroes of M&M games and that travesty that was Might & Magic X over a decade ago. I really wish someone who loved the Might & Magic games could buy up the franchise and bring it back to greatness.
Fun game with great graphics and good story. If it didn't have the spyware and were not one of those that adopted the woke trend of making player characters less beautiful and more "average" looking, I'd give it the full 5 stars. Because of those latter two issues I waited to get this until I could get it for under $20.
I really like the art. Unfortunately the audio is Japanese - although that is not a deal-breaker on its own. It started off great until I reached level 2 and found that for some God-awful reason they have it so you can randomly LOSE stats on level-up. WTFH? What crack-smoking monkey developers do they have that they thought it was a great idea to randomly DOWNGRADE your characters on level-up? That IS a deal-breaker for me . It is unfortunate that GOG does not have a return policy for its games like Steam or I'd refund this PoS.
