Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen

"Tried to step out, but stepped back"

In the first two Might and Magic games, Jon van Caneghem and New World Computing learned from their mistakes, but perhaps they did not make enough mistakes in the third installment to keep the fourth fresh. There aren't any real backtracks, save for the horrendous new voice features and a slowdown when your characters take a heal spell and their face icons go all tingly. It's even exciting to have bigger towns, more minor quests, multi-level castles and weird pyramid icons offering transport to the Darkside of Xeen(aka MM5.) But it makes a bad early impression, there's no fun way to stockpile attributes and experience, and once you figure out what to do it's too short to satisfy but long enough to make you feel you wasted serious time.

MM4 follows the conventions established by the previous installments: a 3-d grid-based RPG, where you have six characters off to save the world. Here you have to kill the big bad guy for the first time(Sheltem in MM2 doesn't count; he was too easy.) Corak is still chasing Sheltem and leaving clues, and you're still stuck in Town 1(called Vertigo here) without any reasonable experience and armor. And this town is four times the size of ones in previous installments, with a clearly defined quest to start. You can even steal some random items! There's also a mirror portal to visit places where you'll immediately get killed, and an outside area where you can pick up basic curing spells and perform minor quests. You can improve your characters' skills(i.e. Swimming to walk on shallow water, or Body Builder giving an extra hit point per level) if you find the right teachers, and there are even fountains to give a small temporary boost to players' stats. MM4 even puts quest items in a separate pile from regular items, so character improvement doesn't clash with solving the game.

And it's pretty intuitive to get started with the game. You've got a 9-button punchpad to the right of the main screen, where you can click your mouse. Or you can just memorize which keys do what. This applies also to your characters at the bottom(F1-F6) and various submenus(you can use arrows, or type highlighted letters--this from a DOS game!) and moving around, with arrow keys and the useful ctrl-arrow to sidestep left and right. The sidesteps, in tandem with two important one-size-fits-all protection spells, can make terrible fights seem trivial and leave you more open to the questing side of MM4.

Which unfortunately is either insulting or tedious after you clear Vertigo. Your next quest after doing so is a place called the Dwarf Mines. There are eight of them, and they become increasingly stringy and narrow and trap-filled as you go along. The later ones are the only giant dungeon maps in the game, and they are no fun to explore. First-time players who don't know the name of the final mine will have to search through a lot of dead ends, boxes hiding monsters, and mazes with secret doors. While you get some permanent bonuses to your stats it's nothing like MM3 and I think this is an overcompensation from that free-for-all, where nothing really needed to be compensated for anyway. Retreading the earlier concept of sewers beneath each town would have worked much better.

And the towns are at least fun to clear. Eventually you'll find a way to use the teleport mirrors to burst through towns, find power-up fountains, and be able to take out all comers. With each town cleared you can buy better spells at the guild, and it all snowballs. But because you have a maximum level of 20, and there aren't many places to increase attributes permanently, you get close to your potential too soon, and the rest of the game is about picking up a few items and maybe seeing some fun side quests. Many such quests happen as follows: Party is notified of big huge menace nearby. Party kills said menace six squares away. Party returns for experience bonus that would've taken several annoying fights otherwise. Party feels like rent-a-cop hired to turn down the neighbor's radio.

The quests generally being one-stop affairs, MM4 feels less robust than MM3 with its symmetrical alignment quests or MM2 and its class-specific quest. There's no real complexity besides having to build a castle, which requires visiting two dungeons to gather special items called Megacredits, which are lying behind relatively trivial fights. Other dungeons let you bypass tough puzzles with a teleport, which is anti-climactic. And in fact the only really new structures seem a bit rushed as well: the towers.

While most maps are on a 16x16 grid, these are shrunk to 10x10 for all practical purposes. With an outer wall, that makes for even less wander capability. There's just not much of a maze to work in, and even the existence of a largely empty cloud world at the top of a tower's four levels doesn't make up for the anticlimax of solving some towers a bit too quickly. Even MM4's multi-level castles suffer from this. You've got towers in each diagonal corner, but they're so small that it's a quick trip to explore all the upper levels. There's no drama, except for how you can steal some royal treasure and shoot through waves of castle guards--on the ground floor, of course.

Still MM4 rescues itself enough--some combats are complex, forcing you to run around your opponents before clinching with them, or to sneak up so they don't see you until you're next to them. The start-of-day routine to power up your players(a magic-world fake it 'til you make it and more complex than any actual quest,) accompanied with my amusement over staying up late at night to figure out ways to help your party stay up, cast a few spells, and be as good as new at 5 AM(them, not me) and the multi-level underground dungeons including one that wasn't dangerous until you changed the water terrain to earth, led to an entertaining finish. Lord Xeen's castle, on top of clouds that are on top of another tower, starts to fulfill the potential of a tricky 4-level weaving maze, but unfortunately there are too many places that remain practically closed off due to difficulty--Shangri-La three levels under a volcano, or the Dragon Cave where you need 100 intelligence to read certain books and can't get close to that even with temporary boosts--for MM4 to seem more like a run-through. At least until the overblown ending.

Which reminds you of one of the better technical parts of the game. You get to see all the monsters you killed during your quest--how they flail and miss, retch amusingly when hit and collapse pathetically. But if variety is the spice of gaming this nonsense will give you heartburn. Seeing so much care put into the monsters and less into the actual game is disturbing. True, none of the other graphics suffered, with bottles floating in the river and reliable automaps and impressive perspective when you fire arrows or cast a fireball. But ultimately I preferred the little talking heads that popped up above a bunch of text that told you about your new quest. As for sound? I was frustrated that turning it off was in a sub-menu. No added voices added anything substantial.

The first two spaceship endings to the Might and Magic series, though far-fetched, opened the player to an even more exciting fantasy world, but sadly MM4 does not continue this trend. It feels more like a setup for the admittedly impressive Might and Magic V(MM5,) but of course people buying MM4 at the time wouldn't have known that. There's a risk to dry, calculated fun in RPG's, with less-than-original jokes and cringy poetry, one MM4 never shook. It is still a nice little game where you run around on grid-based inside maps and solve fetch-quests in the outside world, and in fact it's quite fun to re-solve when you know what can be cut out, but there's no orgy of improvement, increased ease of control, new character features, or involving plot to weave together. The last of these appeared in MM5, as you returned to places shut off in MM4. But without much else to offer, such forbidding dungeons felt restrictive, as if you had to wait for the real fun to begin. I'm just glad I bought the MM1-5 collection so it began sooner.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/01/06