Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra

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US box art.

Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra is a turn-based 3D fantasy role-playing video game developed and published by New World Computing for DOS in 1991, and then for several other platforms.

My brother borrowed this game from a friend shortly after it was released and I played it on my family's 386SX Packard Bell. I was really blown away by this game. It looked far more impressive than any game I had seen before. I was even more impressed when I played it with my Sound Blaster, which not only added music, but speech.

As a child, I didn't get very far into to game because I was too creeped out by the Screamer monsters to venture far past Baywatch. Instead, I tried recording the stats of every item I got in the game. I had a stack of papers and never realized that I only needed to record each individual prefix and suffix! After discovering that Fountain Head had a place where you could work odd jobs for a week to earn gold, and that the bank earned you interest over time, I spent hours making my characters work over an over again. I ended up with millions in the bank, but all my characters ended up dying of old age!

Status

I own the game for DOS in a Might & Magic collection. I have not beaten it.

Reviews

Good

  • The graphics are state of the art for a game from 1991.
  • The combat system is simple enough to not be an obstacle, but complex enough to handle different tactics.
  • The prefix/suffix system for items was a great way of creating nearly countless variations of items.

Bad

  • The music and sound is pretty bland.
  • The dungeon traps are pretty obnoxious. Even though they're clearly visible, they're often unavoidable and only serve to slowly weaken your party.

Ugly

  • The original release had a pretty bad game-breaking bug that made it nearly impossible to win.

Box Art

Links