Might and Magic Puzzle Game in Development

Celestial Heavens has picked up on an interesting blurb on the personal website of Heroes of Might and Magic lead writer Jeff Spock. Apparently a puzzle/RPG hybrid set in the Might and Magic universe is in development and is planned for release on the Nintendo DS later this year:

Upcoming DS fantasy game in the Might and Magic universe (2009)
This will be an awesome puzzle game with an epic fantasy storyline. And, yes, both of those things are possible. Watch the review pages; I think this one will make waves.

What’s more, some of the folks at Celestial Heavens have even spent some hands-on time with it:

Hmm. I’m rather sure that the game will be a success – I enjoyed the first test very much. The game has an astonishing amount of tactical depth and is fun.

A DS has two screens, so imagine Puzzle Quest with two battlefields. Imagine further that depending on whether you’d build horizontal or vertical lines of 3 you’d either form guarding walls or attacks (aiming onto the other battlefield).

Now imagine that instead of the colored discs you have actual units on the BFs with actual stats for attack, defense and initiative (which means in this case the # of turns between the forming of an attack and the actual launching). Which means that depending on your units there are different kind of attacks with different effects and that your main goal in most battles is to kill the opposing hero who has a certain amount of HPs in an “endzone”.

There are artifacts, there is experience, even for creatures, there are spells as well, albeit scarcely, and there is a campaign story.

The game features 5 of the 8 H5 races, and since every race will have EIGHT different units with FIVE upgrades each (even though the upgrade is just a stat upgrade, the unit itself keep the same), there are NEW units – and they even found a nice new name for the old Devil, Abyssal Lord, (which means, that one faction is the Inferno). The 8th Inferno unit, by the way, is called Sorcerer. 🙂

Thanks, RPGWatch.