Dark Messiah: Might and Magic [PC]

The Might & Magic series enters new territory with Dark Messiah, a first-person shooter/sneaker/spell-caster. It uses Half-Life 2's Source engine to drop you into a physics-drenched fantasy world, complete with orcs that skewer, goblins ripe for kicking, and evil knights just begging to have their limbs chopped off. Although the single-player game is overall pretty disappointing, it has its moments. And the multiplayer game is almost worth the price of admission.

The single-player levels were created by Arkane Studios, the French developer responsible for the uneven, but promising Arx Fatalis. Dark Messiah is their attempt to live up to that promise. Although it sometimes resembles Oblivion, this isn't an RPG in the sense that there's a world to explore. Instead, the game shows you everything by essentially moving along rails that pass from battle to battle, occasionally visiting boss fights. As you reach certain milestones, you'll get points you can spend on skills.

The skills are where the RPG stuff comes into play. Do you opt for magical spells, do you put the points into stealth for backstab ambushes, or do you just buff your combat abilities? Each branch has further branches, whether it's elemental magic or charms, or melee or ranged combat. Furthermore, many encounters have a few different solutions, such as using environmental hazards against enemies or simply sneaking past them. It's nowhere near as robust as something like Deus Ex, which is obviously the inspiration for this type of gameplay. But it keeps Dark Messiah from being too linear and predictable.

Unfortunately, it's an ugly and generic looking world. Almost all of the settings are some tedious variation on an underground dungeon, and you'll only ever fight about 10 different monsters. The story is pretty much beside the point, although there are a couple of cool revelations. Most of the puzzles consist of either a) figuring out how to get someplace with your "grappling hook", or b) hunting for a lever to pull. The final stages involve a lot of aimless wandering through big areas with multiple paths, which are a confusing change of pace from the corridor crawling that composed the rest of the game. But by the time it's over, 10 to 12 hours after you've started, you'll be glad you don't have to trudge through another dark dungeon by the blue monochrome light of your infravision spell.

The engine suffers from some long loading times, and it appears to have technical problems that still need to be sorted out. But the enemy character models and animations look good, and the combat has a really solid feel that makes every battle fun, even if you will have to do a lot of quickloading after getting killed. It's awfully satisfying to hack up a zombie or lock swords with an orc. And the over-the-top gory slo-mo adrenaline fatalities are plenty rewarding. A little less poison would have been nice, however, as antidotes always seemed in short supply considering the number of spiders and diseased zombies we faced.