MIGHT AND MAGIC 6 - THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN.

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

Yes I have finally done it. After what seems like weeks and weeks
of doing nothing else I have finally completed the latest 3DO
epic. The item has already been favourably reviewed in this
magazine and reasonably well in the press, so why another comment?
Simply I suppose that few of the reviews were of the whole game I
suspect.

So what of it? First of all it's enormous - I suspect there are at
least 500 hours playing time if you do all the missions and
explore everywhere (as I did). I say this as someone who was
stunned by the size of Ultima 7 Part II and Daggerfall. This is of
course both a good and bad thing - for me the game was ultimately
too large and there were times I doubted I would ever have the
patience to get to the end. Halfway through I wished I'd started
with different characters and attributes but really didn't have
the patience to begin again.  I suspect this size is going to be
the norm for RPGs from the reports I've heard of the up and coming
ones but time will tell.

Secondly the difficulty. It is stupendously difficult - it makes
most shoot-'em-ups seem very easy. Again a good and bad thing but
as someone who creates characters with a magic bent one assumes in
an RPG that things will gradually get less difficult. Not a bit of
it (though the final mission is comparatively easy compared to
some of its predecessors).  For once there is no final big baddie
that takes the whole evening to kill - even with the wrong
strategy as I subsequently discovered I managed it on the second
attempt.  Whether this is a new trend will also remain to be seen.

Otherwise - excellent. Very pretty for an RPG; beautifully
designed dungeons; a vast and powerful army of spells - unlike
M&M5 magic is very important in this game. The storyline and
quests are varied and I suppose I actually wanted to finish it - I
didn't play to the end for the sake of pigheadedness as seems to
have been the case all too often recently.

Yes, buy it and forget all other obligations for the foreseeable
future.

















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