With the release of Might and Magic IX, nearly 20 years later, creator Jon Van Caneghem's New World Computing is still cranking them out. Unfortunately, this latest installment is neither exciting nor ground-breaking. In fact it's about as woefully tired as you could possibly imagine and simply does not stand up to comparison with other games of its type.

Might and Magic IX is a role playing game with many of the features you would expect to find. You create not one but a party of four characters, choose their race, and assign basic skill points to them. Rather than picking classes, you choose a 'path', being either the path of might, or the path of magic. As the game progresses and characters level up, you get to assign new skills and follow your chosen path into more specialised careers such as Mage, Ranger or Paladin.

Your story begins with you washed up on a beach. Rather oddly, you discover, thanks to a gnarled old troll woman, that your destiny is to unite the feuding clans of Chedian against the Beldonian Horde. This is your mission, should you choose to accept it. We strongly advise you to think very carefully about whether you want to do that.

From the moment the intro cinematic starts, you start to get the feeling that all is not well in the land of Chedian. A torch floats past a wall featuring a crude tapestry, depicting the rise and fall of empires, peoples and heroes, and one guy carrying a large rock, while a voice-over provides solemn narration. We're still not sure if it's supposed to be serious or not.

Things go into rapid decline from that point on. The graphics lurch around from sub-standard to atrocious. It is as poor an advertisement for the LithTech engine as you could find. And that's a pity because games like the excellent No-One Lives Forever show just how good the engine can be at high resolution with some decent textures.

The graphics on this game look at least three years out of date, maybe more. That would just about be the kiss of death for any game released in 2002, except maybe in the role playing genre. It's not the eye candy that keeps die-hard RPGers going until 4 a.m. night after night. It's the drive to collect more and more loot and level up again. Unfortunately, the graphics are the least of this game's problems.

The voice acting is nothing short of terrible. M&M9 has earned the dubious honour of having the most irritating dialogue lines ever to be committed to .wav file. It's like the cast of Seventh Heaven all took a perky pill and then hammed up their lines for a local puppet theatre. The voice acting successfully manages to destroy any hope this game had of creating some form of atmosphere.