Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World

Might and Magic II builds on the foundations of the first game and improves on it almost everywhere. Your party travels to the world of Cron, a land facing disaster, and once again it’s up to you to explore, fight and uncover what’s really going on. It’s bigger, more polished and more accessible than Book One, without losing the series’ love of freedom and secrets.

Gameplay

You create a party of up to six characters, and you can also hire extra companions. The classic classes return, joined by two new ones:

• Knights, paladins, archers, clerics, sorcerers and robbers from the first game.
• Barbarians add raw fighting power.
• Ninjas combine combat with stealth and thieving skills.

New secondary skills, such as pathfinding, mountaineering and mapping, give characters useful abilities outside combat and open up new areas of the world. Hirelings and the passing of time, which affects character aging, add more to think about.

Exploration still takes place in first-person on grid-based maps, through towns, castles, dungeons and a large outdoor world. Combat is turn-based and menu-driven, often against large groups of enemies, but the overall difficulty is more balanced than in the first game. Characters can also reach very high levels, giving a strong sense of growth.

Verdict

Might and Magic II is a clear step up from the first game and one of the best first-person RPGs of the late 1980s. It’s still old-fashioned and demanding, but more open and approachable, with a huge world full of things to discover.