RUJOOGWHP

Random Unqualified Judgments On Old Games We've Hardly Played



This is the first of a regular feature, in which we take a demo of a game we haven't played and attempt to base a full review on it, to be known as the slickly titled "RUJOOGWHP". Fun, but you should probably ignore the text and try it out for yourself if you have more than a passing interest regarding the game in question.

Dark Messiah: Might and Magic for PC
Demo courtesy of Steam

The picture above pretty much sums up Dark Messiah. It's essentially all about hacking into loads of fugly orcs, goblins and hard looking blokes in armour until they fall over in a big dead heap. You can hit them, hit them harder, crush them with planks by hitting the support, kick them, kick them onto spikes and kick them off the edge of various high up places. Well, you can zap them with magic and shoot them with arrows, but these are mostly peripheral to the core concept of chopping things with swords and then booting them while they're on the floor.

As you perhaps guessed from the above paragraph, Dark Messiah is a no nonsense game. The only unwieldy elements are the skill upgrades, which end up being neglected in favour of kicking more goblins off cliffs. At first glance it seems a bit like Bethesda's classic Oblivion, and one could do worse for one's inspiration, however the similarities are largely superficial. Where Oblivion had an enormous open map to discover and pretty deep Role Playing, Dark Messiah has linear levels and the aforementioned RPG-lite level up system, where Oblivion had beauty and finesse, Dark Messiah has dank environments (even the outdoor ones) and a slightly clumsy touch. Where Oblivion had bugs, Dark Messiah, has, well, more bugs.

Still, it'd be unfair to compare it in this way as it's clearly not trying to be an Elder Scrolls game. What it's trying to be is a game where you derive fun from twatting stuff with an ever expanding arsenal of increasingly huge weapons, and to its credit, it pulls it off fairly well. Fun was certainly to be had with all the hitting and kicking, but there was a niggling feeling that it was all pretty much the same thing over and over, with some needless fetch-questing in levels seemingly there not to break up the action, but to prevent the player from engaging in it whatsoever.

Overall, Dark Messiah looks quite nice, sounds quite nice, and plays smoothly. The combat is fun- after all stoving in big, ugly Orc faces with maces will never get old- however the game has more than its fair share of issues and there are a few niggling doubts about how much you really are enjoying yourself. Nonetheless, it's worth a whack, with the kicking itself worth the $20 alone.

One liner sum up: "Kick creature off cliff; repeat for 15 hours"