Your donations keep RPGWatch running!
Box Art

Dark Messiah - Reviews @ DriverHeaven & Gamers Temple

by Dhruin, 2006-11-17 21:24:06

Arkane's Dark Messiah has been reviewed at DriverHeaven.  The score is 84% and here's a snip on its apparent freedom:

RPGs often promote exploration and freedom of choice. The first is present here in the form of hidden areas where better weapons and potions can be found. The freedom in this game is also very hard to match. Although the path you have to take to complete the game is very straightforward you have free hands when it comes to how you intend to follow that path. You can blast everything in the path or you can try to get by enemies without them even knowing you are there. Than there are the already mentioned environmental traps that you can lure your foes into. Throughout my adventure I often loaded up a recent savegame just to see if I could get rid of the bad guys in a more amusing or perhaps a more visceral way.

The Gamers Temple isn't quite so impressed, awarding only 64%:

The game really shines when it comes to combat. The battles can be a lot of fun because they give you so many options in dispatching your foes. You can charge in and go sword to sword, or go for a one shot kill with an arrow to the head, or drop rocks on an enemy’s head, or use telekinesis to push him off of a ledge (hmm, the Star Wars theory is looking even better now). This is really pretty cool and can be a lot of fun, but you don’t spend nearly enough time in battle in the game. Most of the time you’ll spend wandering overly long and dull levels trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do next, making your way past cheesy jump sequences, or solving uninteresting puzzles. And just in case you may find solving puzzles to be intriguing, the game provides you with a spirit guide that likes to drop ten ton hints for each puzzle (no, it’s not Obi-Wan). It’s obvious that most of the development effort went into the combat in the game and that not much time was spent on designing the game itself. The game is padded out so that you won’t be able to play through the whole thing in an evening or two (not including installation time – or perhaps that’s an insidious way of padding the game’s life out even further).


Source: Bluesnews

Information about

Dark Messiah

SP/MP: Single + MP
Setting: Fantasy
Genre: Action-RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details