The game has a great concept. It is a deeply complex card game / rogue-lite gauntlet of challenges. It is simple at a first look but it has a lot of depth to be discovered. Where the game ultimately falls apart is in its procedural generation of challenges. The difference in forgiveness for sub-optimal strategies between runs is jarring, and there may be quite a few runs that are generated in a manner that they might be doomed from the start.
I bought this game hoping some something like Grimrock and, while the first couple of hours of the game were fun, the game soon turned into a grind. You'll find yourself fighting the same enemies over and over and too often. A few of them may require some strategy, but only to the extent of "target this one first". Every other class plays like more or less the same thing, except for Force Psyckers which are the cleric-equivalents and Hackers whose value is mainly in accessing a few exclusive things each level. The cyber ninja class might have been done by a member of the team in isolation, considering that it's the only class that shows 2D sprites of itself during combat, leading to a jarring inconsistency in presentation, but it plays like the majority of classes anyway. I don't even remember what's the story anymore. Like, nothing about the story stuck with me AT ALL. I guess you are mercenaries? I guess you can pick missions for this or that faction and improve/worsen relations to this or that faction? I suppose there are small ways in which it affects the story, but the story failed so hard to get me to care that it might as well have been absent. It didn't help that the Void Psycker dialogue (that I had for my main character) was so terrible that it felt like I had a memelord interrupting the conversation.
I found myself recently trying out Age of Wonders as an attempt to relive the excitement of playing Master of Magic, it did not hold up to the memory of this great game at all. This is Civilization meets strategic battles with magical creatures, an absurd amount of spells and large armies. From several playable (AND conquerable) races, to different schools of magic and different features, the game offers a wide variety of winning (and losing) strategies to try. The ruins, nodes and other structures offer great value in exploration and potential for reward, at risk of stepping your foot in an encounter you were not ready to win. It isn't PERFECT, but for me it is the BEST game in the genre so far. Any company that looks into this and finds the proper way to enhance its positive characteristics and fix some of its flaws could be sitting in a goldmine.
This game pack is valuable probably only for the fans of the Might & Magic series (do not confuse it with HEROES of Might & Magic). People unfamiliar with the series might find themselves frustrated with the design of the games. People who know the series, or part of it, however, have in this bundle an excellent pack of games. Revisiting World of Xeen was a great fun time for me, as the game had been one of my favourites in childhood, and trying out Might & Magic 3 was great.
The game isn't irredeemable, but it is deeply unpolished. I would recommend this game mostly in the case where you have already gone through other far more polished metroidvanias out there and feel yourself itching for something different even if flawed. Positives: * Good pixel art. * Dialogue is OK. * Somewhat innovative gameplay Negatives: * The gameplay is innovative, but so unpolished it's often a source of frustration. * Bad level design: there's a lot of uninteresting parts you have to go through, and it is sometimes unclear whether you can go through certain edges of a room. * Broken geometry: you may get stuck in walls, particularly with the spider shape. * Broken UI: HUD may display over speech balloons, some esoteric combinations of menu interactions may leave the game in such a state that pressing the action button also brings up the menu.
