Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven combines the best elements of a real-time first-person RPG with a traditional party based RPG.

Release Date

April 1998.

Pros

The manual was written humourously. Other than being informative, it was quite entertaining to read.

Non-player characters(NPC) can be hired with an up front payment plus a percentage of the gold you find through out your travels. They do not fight with you but provide different abilities that you can use while they are travelling with your party.

There is a nice timing factor in the game. Shops are opened at different times. Days of the week and months of the year can have different things happening.

The skills system is quite interesting. First, each character must learn the skills. Then as you gain levels you assign points to the skills to make them better. There are also teachers around that can train the characters to be experts and masters in their skills. There is a large variety of skills to choose from including weapon types, magic types and general helping skills.

The music is very nice. It is not Dark Messiah of Might and Magic but it is still very nice.

The levels/maps designs are varied and good for both indoor and outdoor. You can go to the top of the mountain and look down on the view. Just do not expect it to look like Oblivion.

Like World of Xeen before it and Oblivion, the game is very large with lots of side quests, lots of places to explore and lots of monsters to fight.

At the beginning it is a bit difficult, but once you get past that, the game is very balanced in the difficulty department. Different areas have different levels of monsters. The game is very open so it is very likely you will enter areas where your party will be wiped out in seconds. But there is always an area that is just right or easy for your party to fight through.

Cons

The wandering NPCs really get in the way and you cannot push them.

The number of classes have been reduced since World of Xeen. Notably missing is the robber/ninja class.

As you can see from the screenshots, the graphics look quite old. No suprises for a game this age.

Other Points

The game plays with a first-person perspective, but unlike other first-person RPGs or shooters, the fighting is very much like the old-school roll-a-dice and see if the numbers say you hit. Each party member and the enemies also have a time factor determining when they can attack next.

Like Baldur’s Gate you can switch between real time and turn-based. It is much easier to fight battles in turn-based mode but you cannot move while in turn-based mode. There are no event triggers for mode switching so it is all manual.

There is an Autonotes feature that keeps quest information among other things. Unfortunately the quest information is quite brief and most of the time it does not tell you where to go to complete the quest. Better to take your own notes when the quests are given.

Monsters and loot do respawn but only after a very long time game time.

When you have completed the game, you can still continue playing. If have some unfinished business, you can go and finish them off after completing the main game.

Biases

Reviewed version 1.2. The GOG.com version comes pre-patched to 1.2.

I have completed the game.

I really liked SWTOR, Torchlight, Oblivion, and Baldur’s Gate 1, 2 plus expansions.

I also liked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Lands of Lore 3, Might and Magic 3, 4 and 5.

I did not like Styrateg.

DRM

Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven is DRM free from GOG.com

Minimum Requirements (as stated on GOG.com)

Windows XP or Windows Vista
1.8 GHz Processor
512MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
4GB HDD (I am not sure why GOG has this requirement when everything installed is less than 700Mb)
CD/DVD drive (or drive emulation utility)
Mouse, Keyboard

Computer Played On

Windows 7 64 bit.
Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
4Gb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1Gb RAM
Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones. Or Logitech G35.
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.

Recommended Mods

GrayFace MM6 Patch – An unofficial patch that fixes stuff as well as adding new features. Note if you install this over the GOG.com version of the game, you will need to setup the playmp3 feature to get any music. To get the default music, make the new folder Music and copy all the mp3s from the Sounds folder, to the Music folder.