Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

I'm going to say something and I know I'm going to get hate mail about it: I hate first person role playing games. I hate them with a passion. Every time I boot one up, I know full well that I am going to be irritated, confused, and generally bothered by the game system and mechanisms. So when I booted up Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, I knew I was going to be in for that. However, I had no idea HOW bad a game like this could be.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is the second RPG to be built on the Half Life 2 engine. The first, ?Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines?, failed so hard that it literally scared the gaming community for the prospects of the Half Life 2 engine. Over a year later, Ubisoft decided to try to stick their ?Might and Magic? series (A fantasy strategy game series) on the Half Life engine, eventually calling the game Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. One could have almost expected they name it ?predictable failure?, but I don't think that would look as good on the box.

As I said above, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a first person role playing game, which essentially means two things: it will attempt to emulate what the Elder Scrolls series has done, and you will spend an unfair amount of time staring at the detail of whatever weapon you have in your hand. Placing you in the shoes of the pupil Sareth, you travel along a predictable storyline doing things that all fantasy stories have done before in the Dark Messiah universe, using magic and weaponry in between.



The battle engine is where this tale of failure and utter gaming collapse starts. Being first person, the game acts quite a bit like a really bad shooter: slash your sword, fire your arrows, swing your staff, drink your health potions. An unfair amount of precedent is also placed in the use of stealth, stolen right from the hands of the Thief series. In this, you spend a lot of time walking around carrying your weapons with the goal of sneaking through castles and mansions, killing necromancers and the demons they summon, and finding out something about some generic story that even I could not really contain enough interest in to remember.

Okay, I'm kidding. The story is simple: Sareth has been ordered by his teacher (a stereotypical wizard, naturally) to go and assist The Great Wizard Lord Menelag (another stereotypical wizard). With his trusty mind guide Xana (Think a chattier Cortana from Halo), he battles the forces of necromancers and their summons to find out who killed Menelag and why, along with discovering what a crystal has to do with the Dark Messiah. The game lasts about 5-10 strong hours, so it is by far not a short tale- but a generic one nonetheless.

And here is where we begin to explain why the game fails. First off, the game is a technological failure in virtually every aspect. Using the Half Life 2 engine, I expected that Ubisoft would have been able to design an at least reasonable gameplay experience, considering how great Half Life 2 was. However, as it turns out, it is the exact opposite- Ubisoft took what may be the greatest engine available for first person gaming and ran it straight into the ground. If you manage to get the game running (which is a feat in and of itself, as it crashes usually before you even get to play), you will be generally forced to play it in the worst graphics mode possible to prevent it from messing itself up. Then, when and if you get it running, the game continues to chug away with a low frame rate on even the highest end systems, purely because the graphics engine has so many unfixed bugs. The multiplayer, as I will try to explain below, does not even work, and when it does, it comes up as probably the most uninteresting and generic multiplayer since multiplayer Pong.

But hey, let's give the game a chance. After I spent about an hour tinkering with the failure of an engine to get it running, I finally got it to play. And then that's where the game began to suck. The game is nothing close to being the next Oblivion, as it features nothing but a very bland battle system that does not require much work at all. While the generic part of the game is easy, many gamers will no doubt find the impossible-to-win battle engine a pain, as Sareth seems incapable of doing anything other than running around slashing like a wuss. The engine attempts to teach you early to ?charge? your strike- yet a very inaccurate aiming system and the general lack of any swordplay mechanics make this impossible, and spell out Sareth's doom even before he gets started. Expect to guzzle down every health drink you find in an attempt to survive against the much more enabled enemies.



Oh, and Multiplayer is a blast. Setting two teams of people against each other- castle versus castle- each player must battle in the battlefield for control or dominance. Of course, this is much akin to games like Day of Defeat or Team Fortress Classic, except remove the testosterone and, again, insert the stench of failure. If you can even get the multiplayer to work (Most people cannot, it needs an update just to get the thing to work), you will discover the multiplayer to be one of the most mundane and uninteresting feats the game has to offer- and hey, that's compared to the single player.

If I have not already made my point clear, let me make it. This game is probably the worst game I have touched in the last year, even counting gems such as ?Prison Tycoon?. Not only is the core game itself generic and stereotypical, but the bugs and irritabilities it contains are not acceptable in the least bit. Ubisoft needs to stop, step back, and begin to look over their policy regarding the completion of games, and hire some damn testers before they do this again. If I ever see someone pick this game up in a store, I will jump, grab the game, toss it away from them, and duck like I threw a grenade. This game is the first in a long time to get zero stars. I'm somewhat depressed we have to waste database space to even host the review for this game.

0 star(s) out of 5

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