Might and Magic was one of the most important and influential of the earliest wave of computer RPGs, debuting in 1986 and continuing through the tenth installment in the series in 2014. Along with Bard’s Tale (my personal favorite), Ultima, Wizardry, and the Gold Box D&D games, M&M became both a major driver of the popularity of RPGs in the 1980s and early 1990s and helped lay the foundation for later waves of RPGs on the computer, including the Baldur’s Gate and Elder Scrolls series.
So it’s a bit of a surprise to see the M&M name on an entirely different game with today’s release of Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians (iTunes • Google Play), a free to play game that dispenses with most aspects of traditional RPGs and strips the game down to character upgrades and battles – lots and lots of battles. If your favorite aspects of dungeon crawls were the waves of enemies you had to defeat, then this is perfect for you. I always preferred the storylines and puzzles of the RPGs I did play, so I tired of Elemental Guardians sooner than other players might, but I will say it was mildly addictive for the way the game constantly dangles new achievements or goals in front of you while raising the bar slightly for each battle in sequence.
The main idea of Elemental Guardians is that you’re some sort of mage who will collect and train various creatures to do all the fighting for you, leveling them up and arming them with “glyphs” that increase their powers. Each creature has a main attack skill and two special attack or defense skills unique to that creature type and that can only be used once every few rounds in battle. Some allow the creature to heal itself or another creature in the party; some focus an attack on one enemy and may paralyze or stun it; some spread the attack against all enemies; and so on, with the game giving you enough creatures that you can pick and choose to form your ideal parties.
The battles involve waves of enemies – three waves in the main track that starts with the tutorial, five waves in some of the separate areas with greater potential rewards – that you must defeat without resting to heal your creatures. Part of the trick of Elemental Guardians is figuring out which enemies to attack first in each wave; because of the weird way the game handles initiative, you’re always better off killing one enemy at a time than spreading the attack too thinly across all enemies. When it’s one of your creatures’ turn to attack, an arrow appears over each of the enemies in green, yellow, or red, indicating if that creature has an advantage or disadvantage when attacking that specific enemy. You can also turn on ‘auto’ mode and let the AI do the actual fighting for you, which isn’t as bad an idea as it might sound because later battles against higher-level enemies can get a little long and monotonous.
Aside from battles, upgrading your creatures is the main task in the game, and one I found a little convoluted. Creatures level up automatically from gaining experience points, although you can also spend potions (which aren’t super plentiful) to level them up more quickly. Each creature can wear six of those glyphs I mentioned, and you can spend more energy points to upgrade the glyphs from level one to at least level 12 (that’s as far as I got), although each time you try to upgrade them you run some unknown risk of failure. You also get a bonus if you put three glyphs of the same type on a creature. When a creature maxes out its levels, you can bump it up a rank, from rank one all the way to five, but to do so, you have to destroy other creatures in your troupe, so I found I was adding and leveling up creatures for the sole purpose of destroying them later to level up my main fighters … which is kind of distasteful if you think about it too much. If you collect enough rare artifacts, you can even ‘evolve’ your creatures, but I think doing so would require playing the game for dozens of hours and I never got close to that point.
You can earn points for completing Missions or reaching Achievements, most of which are things you’ll do routinely just by playing the game and fighting battles, and you earn certain points and rewards every 24 hours anyway, so unless you’re playing this eight hours or more a day you’re not likely to run out of the resources you need to keep playing. There’s also an Arena if you want to battle other actual players from around the world, although I popped in there once and found that the potential opponents were levelled up way beyond any of my creatures, which meant it was sort of a waste of time to try to fight them.
The base game is free to play and Ubisoft pledges to keep it that way, but they do allow you to pay to speed up some of your upgrades or to buy what you’d need to play it for even longer stretches. This isn’t quite the Farmville model, where you’re spending money without a point; it’s more like the game is free for a few hours a day, and if you want to play it even more, or to skip the most basic levels, you can drop a few bucks to get to the harder material.
So that’s a long way of saying that Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians isn’t really my cup of tea, but it’s a good game for its style. Some people just love hack and slash dungeon crawlers, and this game distills the RPG experience to those elements: you fight, you get stuff, you level up and trick out your fighters, and then you go do it all over again. The battles are largely about brute force, and using your special powers every time they become available again, so it’s more about bulking up than any kind of strategy in battle, and the story laid on top of the main path of battles is just window dressing. There are also some areas of the battle map that are greyed out for future expansions, so I imagine they’ll continue to increase the difficulty as players max out their creatures’ strengths. I think I’ve played this one out for myself, though.