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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Kill 'em before they kill you!

Dark Messiah is essentially a FPS game and uses Valve's Source engine for everything - the box claims that it's been enhanced but a better description would be to say that it's be altered to suit the purposes of the game. This is actually a good thing and for several reasons: Source has been around for a good while now and is generally solid and bug-free; it also scales across a wide range of hardware but more on this later.

Since this is a fairly standard fantasy RPG, you're treated to a predictable range of weapons, spells, armour and potions. Mouse and button combinations allows one to swing swords around, parry enemies attacks, kick them in the face and so on - all very simple to get to grips with but certain weapons have a distinctly 'detached' feel to them. Controlling the hero can be rewarding and frustrating at the same time; I never felt quite in control of my whirling combat staff but the pile of bodies strewn around the room easily proved that my frantic button mashing was effective enough!

Most weapons also have 3 modes of use: quick slash 'n' hack, more powerful blows dealt by holding the fire button down for a second or two and a 'fatality' kill move, gained by once the adrenaline meter is full. This gauge builds up as one makes successful hits or spell casts on monsters, so a good technique is to hack away like mad, build up the meter quickly and then let 'em have it with a nice "bullet-time" move.

Arkane have also made a decent attempt at filling the gaps between the periods of combat with a variety of tasks. Some work well, such as using rope arrows to reach hidden secrets, but others seem a little pointless, for example making a new sword that you might not be able to use just yet. New abilities and powers are gained via a hierarchical experience system (i.e. you need to spend points on basic skills first before you can go off and level a room full of orcs with one spell) but one only gets exp points after completing quests - killing enemies, no matter how many, makes no difference to your hero's attributes.

The game actually plays quite well on the recommended minimum specification, although many of the graphical enhancements are missing. Combat though can suffer, particularly when there are several enemies on screen at once and certain levels, such as the ship-based one, stutters badly at all times - a faster CPU and more RAM seemed to settle matters down but no amount of game tweaking offered a solution to these problems for the low spec test machine.

Fortunately, the overall feel of the game remains consistent across a range of hardware. One can still interact with the environment, grabbing or kicking items at enemies or breaking supports, causing heavy objects to crash into things. Ropes and chain can often be climbed but they're basically static - you can't swing about on them unfortunately, which is a missed opportunity to have great fun Tarzan-ing into people, knocking them into bottomless crevices. Animations are consistent too and lend an air of 'weight' to many things; unfortunately this grasp of reality is somewhat spoilt by the repetitive nature of the character models, monsters, landscapes, etc.

For Dark Messiah's multiplayer aspect, the gameplay changes again and works quite differently to the single player mode. Here, you can sign up to be one of a variety of character classes such archers, warriors, priestesses (and their equivalent 'evil' counterparts). Each class has its own skills and attributes that can be improved by picking up exp points for frags - woe betide the newcomer who enters a running game with no skill points though; you'll get thumped quite easily! There are several multiplayer modes but the whole thing is a bit of an acquired taste - fantasy RPGs just aren't twitch games and in the several hours I tried playing multiplayer maps, I achieved a total of one frag!

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