Might and Magic: World of Xeen
for PC

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Wandrell:Popular Vote:
5.5/6
Company: New World Computing
Year: 1993
Genre: RPG
Theme: Sword & Sorcery
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
Views: 27954
Review by Wandrell (2005-09-10)
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World of Xeen is the union of Might and Magic 4 and 5, got from copying xeen.cc from MMIV to the MMV directory. The game gives you the two sides of the coin shaped world of Xeen to explore in your quest to wipe the evil out from it, and a third, and short, new adventure.

This isn't a complex or deep game, it just has a lot of enemies to dismember while exploring the land, its cities and the dungeons in search of keys that will get you to new places to clean. Few things will give you something that is not directly related to violence, just a few spells for travelling; or the skills, that may allow you to travel through different terrains, activate the automap or give you a natural compass.

But even not being a too good game it has some things that are good, like being able to break doors and walls by throwing yourself to them; the special option that gets you back to a secure place, for a price, if you get stuck; the titles that you get by finishing quests, findings things o doing something, which mainly just serve as a mark for exploration and completion; and many places to explore, with a nice range of special objects and locations.

And also it has problems. The character development is unsuprisingly based in levels, typical species and professions that just affect which of the two kinds of spells you can cast, if any, and if you have the rarely used steal skill; the puzzles are normally too simple and easy; and the graphics are irregular and sometimes look like they were taken from different games.

May be a fun game if played from time to time, but not if you do so for a long time.

As a note, the game is just like MM4 and MM5, no new skills, no new spells, no new characters... The only differences you may notice are from the parts added from one or other game, if you already played one, but the games where so clearly made to join each other that it looks more like an expansion with a few additions than another game.

Comments (4) [Post comment]

Wandrell:
Curiously, I've been unable to repeat it on DosBox.
Mr Creosote:

Don't worry, Wandrell, it"s exactly the opposite. What Hirschacker is saying is that his version of MM5 (probably a later release) actually asks him explicitly whether he wants to join it with MM4 to create "World". So no need for any manual copying in that case, the installer does it all automatically.

Interesting tidbit about the translation issues there, though :)

Wandrell:
Ok, I get this is some installation problem you are talking about. If there is a problem, I can upload the versions I have, but can't assure anything about the translations of M&M games, they are quite buggy. The Spanish version of M&M4, I think it was that one, has a memory overflow error just at the beginning due to a text being too big, and also the german versions I've tested to add into my collection gave some problems. Not much testing here.
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