Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

The Good
The character creation system was good, and the freedom of movement and non-linearity of the quests are all to my liking. You are free to explore whatever you want whenever you want.

I also like how the game is real-time for most of the game, but you can change it to turn-based when there is action.

The Bad
The "free" exploration isn't really free, is it? Heading out from town, you are attacked by a horde of enemies. So you switch to turn-based combat, and "fight" the enemies. This pretty much means clicking the enemies one after the other until they are dead. There is very little skill involved, as (at least in the early game) each character will have pretty much only one usable spell, or you will use whatever weapon is equipped. So you click and click and click. There will be a horde of enemies, so after a while you will need to run back to the inn and spend a night in order to regain health points. Then head out of town again, and keep clicking away. Run back to the inn, back out, click-click-click. Then you may find a dungeon, where you explore the different rooms and corridors until you meet another horde. Click-click-click. Run back out of dungeon. Run back to town. Sleep. Run back to dungeon. Run back to room full of enemies. Click-click-click. Get bitten by a bat/spider/rat and get poisoned. Go to temple and pay money to get healed. Go back to the rats. Click-click-click. Get poisoned again. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I don't understand what the makers of this game were thinking and I cannot understand what the people rating this game highly are looking for in a game. I guess the storyline might improve, I gave up after hours upon hours of click-click-clicking, after which I had finished some mildly interesting dungeons. When I headed to the next map screen and was overrun by ten trillion skeletons, and it turned out I had to travel for five days, click-click-click, travel back for five days, go buy 10 days of rations, travel for five days, click-click-click, I gave up.

I don't understand why they made combat this way: rather have fewer, perhaps more challenging encounters? There is never a chance that you will die, as you can simply turn heels and run back to the inn and heal up. There is no way in which you can use skill in the combat in any way, unless you count getting a river between yourself and enemies with no missile weapons and then click-click-clicking for fifteen minutes.

The non-player characters are also completely dead. They pretty much have 2 constant comments each: a general tip, and then you can hire them. Another annoying detail is that all shops/town halls/etc. follow their opening hours very strictly, but the NPC's are running around equally busy whether night or day. So you come into a bustling town full of people, but everything is closed because its 3am.

The Bottom Line
What could conceivably have been an interesting (if lacking in character depth) game becomes a very pointless exercise in left button mouse clicking because the designers chose to create "difficulties" by swarming you with identical monsters and then compensating this by giving you a lightening fast dash which allows you to outrun everyone. Also, a night's sleep and two apples heal all damage.