Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - Arkane Studios SA - PC

[Azazel]

Well, this is a game I picked up quite awhile ago, and have only just gotten around to playing now. It's a FPS-style fantasy game, so a little throwback to Hexen as well. There are RPG elements, and the game proudly tells you that you're not forced into being pigeon-holed into any one class, as you can learn any skills you like. The skills correspond vaguely to the classes of "fighter", "thief", "caster" with various sub-skills mixed in, like archery and so forth.

The plot is the usual fantasy trite kind of thing which you don't much care about, (something about a necromancer and crystals and a spider temple) and the characters are also hard to care about - you, the nameless faceless player, the succubus who inhabits you and makes suggestive comments all game, and the niece of some other wizard who owes you a great debt early on, and serves as the "romantic interest". As I said, who cares?

Visually it's quite nice, if repetitive. As are the enemies. The orc model is very nice, with a very "Uruk-Hai" feel to it. The game uses the Source engine, so you'd expect it to look quite decent, as it does.

The game has a nice "kick" mechanic, where you can kick enemies in combat down stairs, down pits, and onto conveniently located impaling objects. The melee is quite roughly implemented, the archery is ok, and the magic is passable. Overall, the game starts off pretty fun, but with a very Gary Gygax-style flaw, which is there are many times throughout the game (again, starting early on) where if you do the wrong thing, or walk in the wrong direction, (and the right thing's not often that obvious), the game kills you.

A little later in the game, a much larger flaw begins to appear - melee-only fights. There's this orc, see, who you have to kill by only using melee in one-on-one combat. If you use magic or anything else he and his 4 guards will gang-bang you in the smallish chamber you're stuck in with them. This is (probably) fine if you're deep into the "fighter" skill tree. It's not so great if you're playing as a "caster" or more of a "jack of all trades". It took me quite a few tries to get through this fight (more than 10), and while I'm not the world's uberest gamer, I'm still quite decent. I felt that my getting pwned 47 times was more due to my skill choice not being deep fighter tree than my own skill or lack thereof.

Right after that there's another fight with 2 very tough mobs that come out of nowhere, while the silly bitch who has been healing you whenever she's been around through the whole game to that point just stands around doing nothing. This is typical of the kind of problems the game has, along with those Gygax-style traps and insta-kills.

So while this game would have started as a "buy it", it's been downgraded to "rent it/try the demo", but as I play even further into it, I wouldn't be all that surprised if it changes again to "don't bother"...

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Try the Demo.

[NowhereMan]

I'd like to add that multiplayer for this is quite good fun. It's team based, you pick a class and level as you kill people giving you access to more abilities. You can choose fighter, archer, mage, healer or assassin with some generic rpg tendencies e.g. mages start off very weak with a shield spell and short range, low damage attack but can eventually get multiple, seeking fireball spells. The fact that you can choose what abilities and skills you want as you level up gives some options for playstyles even in the same classes and overall seemed fairly well balanced. That said the game's been out a while and I didn't stick with it that long so balance may have been due more to people not knowing the classes that intimately early on and I don't know how lively the multiplayer community is but it might be something to keep in mind.

[Aez]

I liked the game.  The multiplayer was broken at release so I can't comment.

The worst part is the story, it's so bad it's painfull.

I tough that the orc guards section was one of the best, I was melee though.  Is it an automatic cutscene that kill you when you use magic?  I vaguely remember using magic and killing the five orc at the same time.  Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

For Gary Gigax comment.  I played the hardest difficulty and only felt it in the spider temple.  The town and the mountain were fine.

[rk47]

I played it a long time ago, I think this is the best stealth combat mechanic I ever played since thief series. I wish more Action RPG would adopt this. Basically if you're a stealthy person, you'd have a lot of fun with rope arrows and backstabs. And it's intuitive too, you sneak behind enemies then when the time is right, you raise your dagger, just apply the left click and BAM! Insta kill!

[Samwise]

I tough that the orc guards section was one of the best, I was melee though.  Is it an automatic cutscene that kill you when you use magic?  I vaguely remember using magic and killing the five orc at the same time.  Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

No, no automatic kill.  You have the option of fighting the single boss guy without magic, or fighting all of them with it.  When I played through as a mage I just charmed half of the goons right off the bat.

[Big Gulp]

I played it a long time ago, I think this is the best stealth combat mechanic I ever played since thief series. I wish more Action RPG would adopt this. Basically if you're a stealthy person, you'd have a lot of fun with rope arrows and backstabs. And it's intuitive too, you sneak behind enemies then when the time is right, you raise your dagger, just apply the left click and BAM! Insta kill!

Yeah, I tended to play the game like I played Thief; lots of sneaking and archery.  Given that playstyle it wasn't bad.  Of course, I never finished it, so while it's not that bad it's not particularly good either.

[Azazel]

I tough that the orc guards section was one of the best, I was melee though.  Is it an automatic cutscene that kill you when you use magic?  I vaguely remember using magic and killing the five orc at the same time.  Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

No, no automatic kill.  You have the option of fighting the single boss guy without magic, or fighting all of them with it.  When I played through as a mage I just charmed half of the goons right off the bat.

And if you don't have charm, or high melee, you're borked. I guess this is the problem - if you don't go deep into one archetype you get easily fucked up. With the orc guy, if you happen to have magic equipped As I did when his long, talking cutscene ends, they all attack. In other modes, he gets off a hit onto you about 40% of the time before the game will react with a block.


RE: Gary Gygax comment:
Grabbing the crystal at the start - if you don't know where you're supposed to run to afterwards, you die.
Running onto the boat - if you don't know where to go (or the one correct route there, more to the point), you die.
There's a pressure-plate trap in the spider temple where the porticullus comes up and the walls come in. The first time I did this, I killed the mobs outside that area, so I didn't get to see "how the monster works", so when I walked into it, I died. (the second time it went off "working as intended" so I got to see the mob die in there.

[Strazos]

I played the MP demo pretty heavily, and loved every class.

Warrior was kinda fun to run around with. Most people just spammed ftw, but I tried to be a bit more tactical. Also, reflecting fireballs back at people with magic shields is nice.

Archer took a lot of skill, as the shots dropped off after a fairly short distance. But Oh-so-satisfying to get sniper kills.

Mage was great; either sniping with lightning bolt, or playing bombardier with steerable fireballs. Protip: fire the fireball high into the air, and then swoop down to not only bypass walls, but to also make for fun explosions.

Thief was tough in MP, took a lot of skill, but could be very satisfying (but also cheesy).

Finally, the priest. I loved the priest, and played as pure support. An adept priest running through a battlefield, constantly healing and rezzing people, made for a very fun game. Also made your team tons more resilient.

[Samwise]

Thief was tough in MP, took a lot of skill, but could be very satisfying (but also cheesy).

I never tried the MP at all.  Did the stealth abilities work at all?  Like, did the game make some sort of "spot check" for players against your stealth ability and make you invisible if they failed?

[Sky]

I should probably install this when I finish Mass Effect. It came with my 8800gtx. I think I got Ghost Recon with my mobo, never installed that, either.

[NowhereMan]

Thief was tough in MP, took a lot of skill, but could be very satisfying (but also cheesy).

I never tried the MP at all.  Did the stealth abilities work at all?  Like, did the game make some sort of "spot check" for players against your stealth ability and make you invisible if they failed?

Stealth is a limited invisibility, higher levels last longer and it makes you much harder to spot (IIRC you're actually invisible while stationary). You also get a skill to make footsteps quieter, disguise (that starts off as an enemy healer and then you get to pick the class) and a feign death ability. Poison weapons are awesome for disorientating opponents but the assassin's relatively low damage and low hp mean you get pretty fried unless you get the drop on the enemy. Fun class to play as though.

[Azazel]

Post-Mortem.

Well, I finished this thing today. Mostly out of bloody-mindedness, and while it was an okay game in the end, and not particularly bad, it wasn't an especially good one. I had a very brief look at MP, and aside from there being one server with people on it (out of a total of about 20 servers overall), it was laggy and frankly I just didn't care enough to try it out properly after being ganked a couple of times. It's now deeply discounted here in Australia, but even so it's not something I'd recommend as a purchase, simply because there are so many other games that are much better uses of your time than this one. And at this point, it doesn't even work as a cheap purchase soley for online MP, since there's nobody playing it.

The thing that makes me happiest about finishing it is that I can allow myself to play a different FPS now. Maybe time for COD5?