Just bought the whole Might and Magic series since they were all on sale. This one is my favorite though. The story keeps me more focused in this game than it did in MM6 (I love MM6 too though), but you can still wander off wherever you want. Graphics are dated obviously, but the game play and freedom is better than most modern RPGs. Also, Arcomage is not a half bad card game. It's sort of just a throwaway thing they added into the game, but it is as good or better than some card games I have played that cost money. Too bad Arcomage is buggy in this GoG version, the sound is all messed up. Not that big a deal, even in the original, Arcomage would crash my computer sometimes. Love this one for nostalgia reasons. I remember first playing it and thinking that I had to kill the dragon on the starter island. I must have died and reloaded a hundred times before I figured out a way to beat the dragon with low level starter heroes without any deaths. When I started playing this again the other day, it took a few trys, but I still remembered how to kill it. Great game.
I played this in early access and since it launched last week. TLDR version: Fun game that mixes JRPG turn based combat, XCOM1 and 2 ant farm base building, and RTS travel and resource gathering. H6 is a mix of several different game types. The combat is turn based, and similar to JRPGs from the 90's. You basically have 3 different ship commander classes, Engineer, Tactical, and Science. And each has their own ships. Engineer has tankier ships that do ok damage and can do some healing, Tactical is the DPS class, Science is buffs and healing with weaker damage. You can only have 3 ships in a fleet maximum, so having one of each class for buffs/debuffs is adviseable. Your ships and commanders have skills which can inflict various status effects on enemies, which you can then exploit to do extra damage with another ability. For instance, one commander's attack may stun an enemy, then another commander has an ability that does double damage against stunned opponents. There is also ground combat occasionally which is similar to space combat play, though ground combat is more dangerous for your commanders. The game map plays like a RTS that can be paused, the early part of the game you will spend a lot of time flying around to all your colonies to pick up their resources and to defend them from attacks. The Starbase where you train officers, build ships, do research, and so on, plays just like the new XCOM1 and 2 ant farm. You dig out rooms, which sometimes will require ground combat when you find a nest of some alien beasties. The various rooms you can build require energy so you have to build energy generators...if you have played XCOM1 or 2, you already know how to do all this. Overall, I give the game 4/5 stars because there are definitely things that can be improved. The devs are still working on balancing and adding more kickstart goals to the game, so it isn't completely finished, there is more to come. Here are some of things that I don't like about the game, possibly some spoilers in here about strategy, just skip if you don't want to know anything about gameplay yet. 1. The combat really starts to feel the same, and there is a lot of combat. I felt this way about all JRPGs though. You tend to use the same "best" combos every single combat. Not sure how they fix that, it's pretty much built into JRPG turn based combat. Game could definitely use an "auto combat" or much faster combat speed, the animations are cool and all but after you've seen them a few hundred times, you may just want to get to the end of the combat. The devs have said they are looking into solutions for this. 2. You are too rushed in the early game. This game reminds me of Star Control 2 in that way. Both games you are free to roam around doing whatever you want, but time is passing. There is the illusion of freedom, but in reality, if you do not do some very specific things, you are going to lose the game. That was ok in SC2 because just roaming around and exploring the hundreds of star systems was fun by itself even if you lost the game. It doesn't work as well in H6 because there isn't a lot of exploration. In H6, you need to be constantly resource gathering and researching/building higher tier ships or you are going to lose. There are lots of different things you can build/research, but anything that doesn't make your commanders or ships better is just a waste. It makes the early game feel very rushed, and you are funneled into certain research projects while all other research is pointless. I hope this is something they will balance. I guess it reminds me of XCOM2 world map also, there is constantly something happening that you have to respond to, so you just feel rushed all the time. Some people may like that, but I don't. I think H6 would be better if the pace was slower at the start so you could do some more base building and research. As it is now, I literally do not build or research anything that doesn't improve my commanders or let me build better ships because resources and time are too limited to do anything else. 3. Ground combat is far more dangerous for your commanders than space combat. The devs have said that they are aware of this, so this will be balanced fairly soon I suspect. Overall, it's a fun game. I bought the game full price in early access and don't regret it. Definitely worth it if you can get it on sale.
