The latest games in the Might and Magic series have been mostly so-so. None of them were bad (far from it actually), but for the most part they didn't quite meet expectations. Fans of the lore (as well as fps junkies) had high hopes for the next iteration of the franchise – the medieval fps Dark Messiah. The preview videos all looked great and from what could be seen the game play wasn't bad either. Though some people were worried that the game would get boring and repetitive very quickly (kicking people into spikes is only fun for so long) the general opinion was that the game would be good.

Not quite Middle Earth

Most of the classic fantasy worlds are almost exact copies of one-another. This holds true for the world of Might and Magic, but luckily for the game the presentation and the story manage to keep things interesting. The later depicts the adventure of Sareth, a young warrior (or thief or mage or something in between) on his quest which starts out as a simple crystal delivery. It doesn’t take long for the story to pick up and start throwing Cyclops and dragons at the player. To spice things up a major part of the game takes place on an island where the architecture is quite a bit different than what you are used to in medieval themed games.

The boot of doom

Most of the game play revolves around you trying to convince several opponents to just lie down and die. Depending on your play style your main argument could be a pair of daggers, harvesting lives from the shadows. If you are a more head on guy you could always try to persuade your enemies with a sharp sword and a shield to prevent any rebuffs. Last but not least is the option to simply set your enemies afire with the help of magic. All three approaches are viable and result in painful deaths of those that oppose you. Most of the time the choice comes down to personal preference, but some (small) parts of the game are only available to a certain class (locked doors that only a thief can unlock).

Regardless of your profession you’ll be using your boots a lot. Kicking enemies into spikes and off ledges is by far the most effecting way of eliminating them, often outperforming even the most powerful abilities/spells. To keep things balanced the authors included stamina which gets drained as you flail your leg around. This prevents kicking to be overused; however the amount of enemies you’ll kill simply by pushing them into a sharp object is ludicrous.

Besides kicking around and using your fighting abilities an effective way of sending your enemies to an early grave is using the environment to your advantage. I’ve already mentioned spikes and bottomless pits, but they are not the only environmental hazards for your enemies. Destructible wooden constructions, fragile statues, traps and more can often determine the length of a battle – 5 enemies can be easily dispatched with a single dropped statue for example.

RPG-Lite

You will rarely see mages, warriors and thieves staring in a game without some sort of experience points appearing somewhere in the mix. Dark Messiah is no different and you get experience points for carrying out objectives and solving optional tasks. You can than spend these points in one of the three skill trees – combat, magic and misc. Combat is further split up into heavy melee weapons, ranged weapons, light weapons (daggers) and more. Magic covers all of the classic spells and misc encompasses mana and health regeneration, sneaking and similar skills.

How you spend your experience points is up to you and hybrid characters are not out of the question. Specializing makes your character extremely powerful in one area, but being a jack of all trades gives your more possible solutions to the problems you encounter, be they enemies that need dispatching or traps that can be avoided.

RPGs often promote exploration and freedom of choice. The first is present here in the form of hidden areas where better weapons and potions can be found. The freedom in this game is also very hard to match. Although the path you have to take to complete the game is very straightforward you have free hands when it comes to how you intend to follow that path. You can blast everything in the path or you can try to get by enemies without them even knowing you are there. Than there are the already mentioned environmental traps that you can lure your foes into. Throughout my adventure I often loaded up a recent savegame just to see if I could get rid of the bad guys in a more amusing or perhaps a more visceral way.

The combat system in the game is one of the best in the recent years. Playing a mage is in some ways similar to a regular fps experience and playing a stealthy character has you killing opponents that don’t even know you exist. Melee combat on the other hand is something that has to be experienced first hand to truly appreciate. You can almost feel the impact when your sword hits the enemy and the way the camera moves when you get hit is a good indicator that you are vulnerable to sword hits yourself. If I’d have to name a single thing that separates this game from the rest I’d probably go with sword combat.

The magic behind it

As you probably already know the game uses Valve’s Source engine. While some may disagree, the Source engine is one of the prettiest engines of this generation. Half Life 2 and its sequel/expansion Episode 1 have shown this in the past, but Dark Messiah manages to raise the bar even higher. The environments you’ll explore look breathtaking most of the time, and you won’t find more impressive castles and temples in any other game. Bumped up textures can be found literally everywhere and pixel shaders are used for almost every effect in the game. They include spell effects and what I find to be the most amazing looking water ever (even better than the proverbially good looking water in HL2). Enemies are all well detailed and since you’ll be often fighting them from up close you can really appreciate the amount of time the authors put into creating them.

Unfortunately the great looks of the game have a negative effect on its performance. While most of the performance issues you’ll experience with the game can be attributed to bugs it is annoying to be forced to play with some settings set to medium quality (textures for example) only because the game is not optimized and higher settings cause crashes when loading levels. Having a video card with 512mb of memory fixes most of these crashes and helps keep the fps high. (The first patch which fixes 80% of the crashes has been recently released).

Audio quality is top notch as well and the voiceovers are well done. Since the game is based on the Source engine the notorious sound stuttering returns and trying to play the game at settings higher than the recommended for your machine will cause annoying audio skipping whenever the game is loading something – this is particularly annoying during conversations.

Older hardware (GeForce 7300 equivalent, 512mb of memory and a 2Ghz processor) won’t have problems running the game but you should expect it to look a good bit worse – textures will be all blurry, there will be fewer effects and you’ll have to do without HDR. All in all the game will still look ok, but nowhere near what you would see on a high end machine.

One to rule them all

The multiplayer component of Dark Messiah was developed by another team and somehow you can tell that straight away as you enter the game. The menus are different and the settings are not linked to those in the single player mode (similar to HL2 and HL2:DM). This is not bad however, as most of the performance/stability issues I had with the singleplayer portion of the game were absent here.

When playing a multiplayer match the player can choose from 5 classes – mage, fighter, cleric, assassin and ranger. Each of them plays completely differently and has access to skills available only to that class. Killing enemies (or keeping your friends alive as a cleric) earns you experience which can be spent in a skill tree with skills belonging to the chosen class.

The multiplayer modes available are the standard (team) deathmatch and a more interesting crusade mode. In it two teams battle each other across 5 maps, with the 1st and 5th map being the citadels of one of the teams. The 2nd and 4th maps are both more neutral, but the team whose citadel map is nearer has a tactical advantage. The 3rd (middle) map is the map where the matches start out. The objective on each map is to hold capture points and holding them slows down the rate at which your team points drop (the first team to lose all points loses the map). Winning a map makes the next match to take place on the map closer to the enemy’s citadel. The citadel maps are a bit different since on them one team is trying to capture all the points while the other one is desperately trying to prevent this from happening. All in all this mode is very enjoyable, especially since the usual machine guns and pistols are replaced with swords and magic.

Unfortunately the nature of combat (melee) often makes battles difficult if even the slightest lag is present. While this is generally not a problem I’ve often had problems hitting an enemy even though my ping was below 60. Perhaps a future patch will address this issue.

Conclusion

It turns out that Dark Messiah is at long last a Might and Magic game that does not disappoint. It has certain issues and while some of them are due to the nature of the game (overuse of kicking) most of them will be ironed out soon enough. The combat in this game is simply one of the best experiences of the past few months and the length of the game is reasonable (I’d say about 10 hours for a single run – multiple endings and different classes encourage several play-throughs). Add the multiplayer and you have a package that will keep you occupied for weeks.

Gameplay	18/20	Sword combat has never been this fun. Being a mage or thief is also enjoyable. A truly epic story keeps you hooked until the very end.
Graphics	18/20	The Source engine at its best. Beautiful vistas and great looking enemies make this one of the prettiest games available at the moment.
Sound	17/20	A good sound background makes the experience come to life. The Source sound stuttering makes a return and causes some gray hairs to the one playing.
Value	17/20	Roughly 10 hours for a single run-through * several classes and endings + multiplayer = hours upon hours of fun
Preference	16/20	RPG fans will want more depth and FPS addicts won’t care much for the world, but overall both will enjoy the experience.
Overall	84/100	If you thought Oblivion had engaging sword fighting you will be blown away by Dark Messiah. The fantasy setting is a breath of fresh air in the WW2 stuffed FPS genre – highly recommended