Yesterday, I downloaded the demo for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and I played it yesterday and today. I have a few bullet-point impressions, in no particular order.

• The game has some very cool visual effects. The idle effects for spells are pretty darned cool, as are the underwater effects.
• Body awareness is in the game, meaning that you can look down and see your body. This has a direct effect on movement in the game; your hero moves a bit more slowly and a lot less smoothly than in most first-person games. I think this particular feature tends to either really turn people off or on, with not a lot of in-between. I tend to like body awareness a lot, for some reason that I haven’t yet pinpointed.
• The loading times are really, really slow. I mean, you’re sitting there for a minute to a minute and a half, just waiting for the next level to load.
• The combat is wicked cool. It reminds me a lot of the philosophy behind Iron Heroes, with a heavy emphasis on using your surroundings to your advantage. In any given combat, you’re generally going to be able to throw things or kick enemies into things (or off of things) in order to gain the upper hand in the fight. It’s really a lot of fun. In one particular situation, I used a well-placed ice spell to send an orc sprawling, then kicked him off a ledge to finish him off. Great use of physics and surroundings in conjunction.
• Some bugs. I noticed a few visual glitches, and one bug repeatedly kept me from finishing the demo by crashing the game just before the big fight with the cyclops (now, I gather from the Internet that you’re not actually supposed to fight the cyclops, that that’s the end of the demo. That’s fine, but having to shut my computer down because the game locked it up at the end of the demo is kind of a bummer). This stuff will, hopefully, be ironed out in the final version of the game.

All in all, I was pretty impressed with the demo. I really like the gameplay and the skills you get to learn, and the combat is lots of fun and pretty challenging. I’m looking forward to the game now, I just hope some of the rough edges are ironed out before its release.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Links, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.