Oblivion needed their Melee System
Most of us love shooting enemies with the Spaz-12 or the PS90 in our favorite first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2. Do we ever enjoy first-person melee combat though? Oblivion failed at providing a non-autistic form of first-person melee combat (FPM), which would lead some to believe that it couldn’t be done if Bethesda couldn’t pull of FPM. Conclusions, although decisive never really give us the truth. The truth, well Bethesda turned fighting with swords in the first person into an autistic upbeat laughable paradigm while Arkane turned it into an enjoyable pleasure, it may just replace masturbation Arkane studios, if you have heard of them or not all you need to know is that even though Dark Messiah of Might and Magic got horrible initial reviews, a few months later it is a great game. After an initial scare of computers breaking with this game because of its buggy release, everything seems to be in order, except for a frame rate issue. Built on the source engine; hence the mention of HL2 and CS, we can finally see what can be done with talents beyond valve; they are breathtaking. The implementation of HDR and new textures brings the game to life as you kill orcs, goblins, and dragons. Talking about graphics in this game would be like talking about the hotness of Keira Knightly or some other Hollywood babe; we already know they/it is pretty. Which leaves us to some pondering: What is so great about this game? Well, the story line while cliche at times (but what isn’t now a days) will engross you into the games world and may make you love the devil inside your head or the blond trying to court you. Narrated by you, Sareth, your goal is unknown until about the last few levels. This isn’t bad, as most people would think, it allows paranoia and for you to actually use your brain to figure out the plot. While it is predictable, the story is about as engrossing and entertaining as the book Eragon. I won’t leave much about the plot in this review; you should be interested in finding out if you are the Dark Messiah. This review could talk about sound quality of the game, but I’d rather not. That is to be expected from a game using the Source engine. A lot is expected from this game because it is the Source engine, and well, most of the time it lives up to it. Some issues would be the low frame rates you can get on a high-end system and all the initial bugs that made this even worse at release. After fixing it we can come back and look at the beautiful lush landscapes and caverns Arkane was able to make. The true thrill of the game is finding some of the coolest weapons and killing orcs, and goblins, and necromancers with them. In one portion of the game I found some lightning daggers, which became my favorite, I ran around stabbing Orcs in the back; a skill you can acquire among many others. You will find soon though, that the best weapons you may never use because there are so many different combination, permutations that you can choose. After fixing the bugs, Dark Messiah finally stands out as the game it should be. A tale from a long remembered series that gives you the choice of good and evil and inserts that formula into a beautiful world only the medieval thoughts could deliver. There is a multiplayer aspect to this game, yet, it falls short from the quality of single player. I played for about thirty minutes before I was bored and decided to play BF2142. The game doesn’t lend itself well to that aspect, while castle siege is fun; there isn’t much organization of the multiplayer portion of this romp through the world of Might and Magic. If you dodged this game because of initial reviews, look at it again and I think you will change your mind. The intense melee fighting should be enough to pick this one up.
