Dark Messiah: A Might and Magic Joint
I went out last weekend and did a little video-game shopping. While I occasionally punctuate breaks in Halo3 with bouts of Rock Band, I do sometimes crave more singular adventures. So I rifled through the cheap bin at the local EB and picked up Dark Messiah Might and Magic Elements for $29.99.
“Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Elements” (Ubisoft)
l like the fantasy adventure genre as a concept. In practice, I tend to get bored with them after awhile. Oblivion was like that, though I must say I got quite a bit of mileage out of it. Also, Oblivion was a great game and almost completely non-linear. You could do whatever the heck you wanted in Oblivion. It did get pretty serious after you completed several of the story-line quests and the world became a dark seething nether-pit of otherworldly hell dotted with swirling gyres bridging the membrane between our world and the planes of hell…
Dark Messiah is nothing like Oblivion. At its heart, it’s a first-person adventure game. I chose an assassin as a character, because I wanted to try being stealthy and didn’t want to futz about with spells too much. The graphics are gloomy and kind of drab, but not in the Gears of War way where they are a crisp and detailed many-shades-of-grey. No, they are almost fuzzy in their lack of resolution. This game looks like it belongs on the previous generation of Xbox.
But that’s fine. Graphics are not its strong suit. The combat is all first-personish. As an assassin, you start out with a pair of daggers which, when armed, are thrust in front of you blocking a good portion of the screen. You can crouch, sprint and parry. When you’re on the attack, holding the right trigger can do power moves. You have an adrenaline meter which when fully-charge lets you unleash a mighty attack cleaving your opponents in twain! You can also kick opponents into conveniently-located spiky walls or off of buildings.
The combat’s not very good. In fact, the gameplay kind of reminds me of Hexen from the Quake 1 era.
But the story! Let’s talk about the story for a bit. You start out as an apprentice to some sorcerer type instructing you through the game’s prologue. He coaches you on killing bad guys (everybody’s a bad guy in the prologue) and gets you through that business. Then there’s some business about a crystal and you’re given a slutty companion who… crawls into your head? Who frequently makes inappropriate comments but helps you get to a castle where you’re meeting a necromancer (aren’t they supposed to be bad guys?) to do something with a crystal (??) … whose daughter is kind of fetching but the slutty companion (in your head!) keeps making comments about…
the cyclops…
Remember in Oblivion how you could go anywhere you wanted and do whatever you wanted? This game is not like that. You can only go in one direction and you have to do it in the order that you’re told. There is no deviation. No side-quests. There are glowy relics which you can collect but they’re not very interesting. Also, the loot is pretty mundane.
Now, to be fair, I’ve only played this for a sum total of about 6 hours. I’m on chapter 4 so there’s some possibility this game is going to “open up” and turn into a fantastic adventure game, but I really don’t think it’s going that way. For a game rated M, it doesn’t seem very mature. There’s not enough blood in the combat and the innuendo by the internalized helper girl is jejune. I do enjoy seeing some of the magic and names from the Might and Magic series – they bring back fond memories of the Heroes of Might and Magic games I played on the PC. But this has none of the strategy or fun of those games.
1 star. If that.
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