Hey there! This week I reminisced about a great experience I missed out on at its time, but played around 2017-2018: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, to which we will refer as Dark Messiah for simplicity's sake, seeing as the full name is just too long.
If you haven't heard of the game, it is only the second project of Arkane Studios, most famously, developers of Dishonored and the, sadly ignored, Prey (no, the other ignored Prey, not the Doom 3 engine one). So, what exactly is Dark Messiah? Well, the game is basically a first person brawler, with a dash of RPG and some transplanted Thief DNA. The action of the game takes place in the rebooted Might and Magic universe, in a very generic region called Ashan, and if you want to know why Ashan is a disgrace, ask @unacomn. Anyway, the game does not focus on the story, but on the gameplay, so let's delve into that.
From the very first moment of gameplay, the game pushes you to think outside the box. The first offensive action you are taught in the tutorial is kicking, specifically kicking an enemy of a ledge. This sets the tone very well: fighting honorably with a sword and shield is for chumps. If you play the game right, you will use physics objects, kicks, spells and sometimes weapons to beat your enemies, and the physics themselves should be great, as the game is running on the Source engine (come to think of it, this game is an anomaly: a Source engine game published by Ubisoft).The game also features some light stealth elements, featuring a light circle on your crosshair which functions like the light gem in Thief, telling you if you can easily be seen. You can also sneak behind enemies and assassinate them with daggers, or snipe them from afar with a bow. Continuing with the Thief inspiration, there are also rope arrows, which can be stuck in wooden surfaces and used as ways to ascend or swing.
This is where the Thief infusion ends and the rest of the fun begins. In an early mission, you can make a chandelier swing like a wrecking ball and bait enemies in front of it and watch them ragdoll satisfyingly after the impact. Or, another fun thing you can do is use the freeze spell not on your enemies, but on the ground and watch as enemies slip on it, preferably into a chasm while screaming. You can even use enemy corpses as makeshift shields, holding them in front of you, or ignite oil puddles, or even crash a platform from under a guy's feet. This is not to say that the melee weapon combat is weak. each weapon type has its unique moveset, you can parry attacks with a shield and, in extended combat, a rage meter fills, guaranteeing a dismemberment kill once it is full.
Combat is a big fat pillar of this game, another being exploration. There are no stores, so what you loot is what you get, both in healing and offensive means. Add to this the leveling system, which grants you skill points for completing objectives and finding secrets, so in order to get stronger you will have to comb the game's levels, and the secrets are really well hidden, like a secret alcove of a library, which can be entered by platforming over other bookcases. Speaking of platforming: from time to time there will be levels which will require you do some first person platforming, and this is no ordinary first person platforming, because your character is not just a camera with arms. You have a full body under you and it has inertia and collisions, so you will have to take that into account while flinging yourself around. The first full on platforming level is a chase sequence across the rooftops of a city I didn't care enough about to remember the name of, and, personally, I found it pretty fun, but, then again, I like first person platforming in general.
We're nearing the end, so let's talk a bit about the story: you are Sareth, the apprentice of a wizard (who is clearly evil) who plants into your head a succubus named Xana. From there, the story is an excuse to drag you along to several locations to combat the rise of Arantir, a necromancer who you are lead to believe is the Dark Messiah, including an island filled with orcs. In this place you make one of the two choices the game serves you: save a girl named Leanna which tagged along, or not. If you save her, later you are served the second choice: purge Xena from your mind or not. The plot twist happens between these two potential choices: you are actually the Dark Messiah and your master knew all along. Apparently Arantir wants to sacrifice the entire city, which is built atop an ancient necropolis, in order to seal your father, who is a powerful demon, away. No matter the choices from before, you kill Arantir, because genocide is bad, and then get another choice (I lied about the two choices before): seal your father away, or free him (funnily enough, if you free him, he is proud of you and the two of you go on a father-son bonding adventure of conquering the world).
All in all, this is a pretty good game, maybe a bit glitchy, but it is a 2006 game, so it running on modern hardware is a miracle in itself. Also, its full price on Steam is 5 euros/pounds/whatever big currency you are using, and it goes on sale pretty often, so I'd say go for this game.
Steam page: here
GamingHD Discord: https://discord.gg/CZSXJwy
Ooo, man, I remember trying to download the demo of this back in the day. It was 1GB. That was more than most games, so I never tried it. Years later I got the actual game, and after a few crashes I found myself dying constantly in fights, until I figured out why the kick was there. This wasn't Duke Nukem's Mighty Foot, this was the Gravity Gun. I've been meaning to replay it with more focus on magic one day.
Well, you're proving my point that fighting fair in the game is for suckers. The magic is pretty fun, especially the fire and ice spells, as you can create a lot of opportunities with them, but using them purely offensive is not the most effective means of dispatching enemies.