So Yahtzee took a swing at our newest MM-game, and I am annoyingly in agreement with him. I hate when that happens, but after a while it becomes kind of futile to escape the frustration of mainly two things: The grid-based movement and the inescapable combat.

Now I like that the game on the high difficulty is continually smacking me around like Im hardly even there, forcing me to scout for quests and enemies that I have a chance to beat. Im fine with that. What I absolutely hate is the exact situation that he describes, which is what just happened to me: You walk through a magical tree-portal only to walk into a 600 foot Minotaur of Epic Doom, who then casually annihilates you in three cleave attacks with you having absolutely no way of fighting back - including by running away! It's so bloody frustrating that it's forcing me to save-scum, because if I ever get out too deep I am dead with no chance to bolt for it - yawn! It ruins the adventuring fun by becoming an oldschool trial-and-error-platformer, which is sad to say the least.

And then there is that grid-system movement. My goodness I hate it. I picked a stern, what-appears-to-be-quite-old elven ranger to dish out the hurt at range. Well, I think she's killed litterally (as in: litterally) 100 times more creatures in melee than at range, because unless the enemy is exactly on your line of tile - something they actively attempt to dodge - you can't... shoot them... what? At best you get 5 shots before the enemy is in melee, which happens once per never. Im fine with tuning down ranged kiting, but its so extremely in the other ditch that I wonder what they were thinking. The grid-thing also really hampers adventuring, mostly because I feel obliged to grid-surf in order to not miss anything. Even in towns! What was so bad about the MM7-movement system outside of combat that they couldn't just use that? I had to scout for "things" by looking at said "things", now Im just path-walking down 1 linear wooden path after the other to get to the chest at the end. I don't get the secrets system, I hate the lack of Perception-like abilities that don't need refreshing every 50 steps and there are too many One-Turn-Kill-spells in the most arbitrary of places. Culled your way through the Elemental Forge-elves? Have some Light Elementals! Oh... they were kind of easy. Not like the doombringers from HoMM6. Now! Walk three steps to the right towards those two Air Elementa... aaaand you're dead to double Chain Lightning of complete annihilation. Hope you save-scummed! You prick!

At least my Paladin is a walking monster of awesome, else I would probably have given up by now out of sheer frustration. I cannot wrap my head around the downgrade in design from games that are 15 years old.