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| Too bad there's not more combat in the game. |
The game really shines when it comes to combat. The battles can be a lot of
fun because they give you so many options in dispatching your foes. You can
charge in and go sword to sword, or go for a one shot kill with an arrow to the
head, or drop rocks on an enemy’s head, or use telekinesis to push him off of a
ledge (hmm, the Star Wars theory is looking even better now). This is really
pretty cool and can be a lot of fun, but you don’t spend nearly enough time in
battle in the game. Most of the time you’ll spend wandering overly long and dull
levels trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do next, making your way
past cheesy jump sequences, or solving uninteresting puzzles. And just in case
you may find solving puzzles to be intriguing, the game provides you with a
spirit guide that likes to drop ten ton hints for each puzzle (no, it’s not
Obi-Wan). It’s obvious that most of the development effort went into the combat
in the game and that not much time was spent on designing the game itself. The
game is padded out so that you won’t be able to play through the whole thing in
an evening or two (not including installation time – or perhaps that’s an
insidious way of padding the game’s life out even further).
The game does provide a multiplayer component, but like the single player
game it’s not nearly as cool as it could have been. For some reason all of the
fun ways to kill foes have been removed from the multiplayer game. How much fun
would it have been to frag someone by knocking a platform down and onto his or
her head? We’ll never know. There are five classes in the multiplayer game
(Warrior, Assassin, Mage, Priestess, and Archer), but spend a little time with
the multiplayer game and you’ll see that there are some serious balance issues
with the classes (if the fact that every game has a ton of Priestesses running
around didn’t tip you off already). Melee classes are at a distinct
disadvantage, which takes a lot of the fun out of trying to bash some heads in
with a sword.
With more action and more engaging levels and storyline, Dark Messiah may
have been a great game. As it stands though, it feels like a demo in search of a
full game or a game brought to market a year before its time. If you’re dying to
check out the game’s unique and enjoyable combat elements then by all means do
so, but bring a lot of patience with you.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
64%. You can add Dark Messiah to the list of games
that fail to live up to their potential.
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