[QUOTE="JP_Russell"][QUOTE="eva89"] c&c shld get 7-8
and gs gave dark messiah 6.5?but users gave a 8?i tried the demo i felt the gameplay is cool...did the technical glitches really pull it down?
Arch-Vil
I honestly don't know why the users gave it an 8. GS gave it a 6.7, actually. That's just a tad bit too low in my opinion, but it's not too far off. I have it rated at a 7.5, but I've been considering lowering it to a 7. It's a little frustrating, though, because it doesn't quite feel as good as a 7.5, but maybe just a bit better than a 7. If the old rating system were in place, I'd probably give it a 7.2 or 7.3.
First off, let me say that the demo is quite deceiving. I played it and thought it was pretty awesome, and bought the game assuming it would be roughly on the same level. Unfortunately, the demo is really more of a highlight of most of the best aspects of the game. It's like that commercial you see of a movie that looks fantastic, then you go to see the movie and find that the commercial actually showed 80% of all the best moments in the movie.
The technical issues were pretty bad sometimes before, but the really bad stuff has been resolved in patches for the most part, so it's not something to really worry about anymore. Performance still feels like it could be better, but I've seen worse optimization.
The combat remains mostly as good as it is in the demo, but with a small disappointment. Something the demo made me think was that the game would be full of fight scenes where you fight multiple opponents, but with the right moves and combinations of skills you could really rip it up and chop them all down without taking much damage (this impression came from the fact that the orcs are much easier in the demo than in the full game - seriously, don't think you can just take them all on at once the first time you see them, you'll get your ass handed to you). While you are rewarded with more satisfying fights when you perform lots of maneuvers and mix things up a bit, it isn't quite what the demo had me imagining.
That said, the combat is still rather fun. You won't find another FP fantasy action game that has quite the complexity and provides the kind of visual and effectual satisfaction that Dark Messiah does. The variety of power attacks that swords have, the ability to knock multiple melee opponents off their feet with the staff, the gratifying backstab of the daggers. Magic attacks have some awesome hand animations, and while magic itself isn't always the most effective attack option (until you invest a lot of points in your mana, you have very little to cast with and it regenerates at an extremely slow rate), it's still useful and is as fun as every other option to use. Fatality attack animations are just too much fun; throwing a dagger into the throat of an opponent, snapping their neck with a staff across their throat, and many others.
A lot of things drag down some of the greater aspects of the game, though.
- Most of the voice-acting is pretty bad. You can hear some of it in the demo, and it doesn't get any better. The skill system is put together terribly.
- Many of the skills you can put points into are pointless or awfully close to it (lockpicking, poison resistance, double fatalities, etc.). Most take too many points to unlock for their use; the game seems to encourage mixing different skill sets, but this is hard to do when you can't even get close to unlocking half the skills with the amount of points you get throughout the game. Archery skills are too sketchy, the game can't seem to decide whether it wants archer to be another class all on its own or just a sub-class to be combined with the others.
- Weapon variation and design is done meticulously. Many of the weapons in the game look very nice and stylish, very seperate from the others. But their aesthetic uniqueness is mostly just for looks. All swords are used exactly the same way, as are all staffs, and so on; and some weapons aren't as deadly as they appear. Some weapons require that you have certain skills unlocked to be able to use them. Some of these are found too early to even be used because there is no way to have unlocked the required skill by that time in the game. Other weapons have skill requirements that are far beyond their usefulness. Yet others require putting points into skills that aren't even specific to that weapon's preferred class (daggers or staffs requiring warrior skills for instance).
- Using bows can be frustrating sometimes. Bows themselves are not effective in heavy combat at all until you get further into the game where you suddenly find at least one in particular that has insane damage. They're also awkward to fire, with the arrows having a strange trajectory. They move incredibly quickly as though they were fired out of a cannon, but fall toward the ground so fast you'd think they've got lead blocks attached for arrowheads. There's also the matter of jumping while having an arrow drawn. This causes you to instantly slacken the bowstring and put the arrow away again, which is fine, but the problem is that the game detects you as falling when you step off of a one-foot-high ledge, so just walking around on uneven ground with a drawn arrow can make him put the arrow away, which can happen a lot and really get on your nerves.
- Magic skills, which as you may have figured from the demo, take up inventory space like weapons and other items. This may not seem like an issue, but once you get pretty far into the game and your inventory starts filling up, you begin to realize just how stupid it is that you can't pick up that shield because your inventory is packed full of rings, weapons, potions, and... spells? Another problem I've experienced with this is if your inventory and your number selection slots are full, and you spend points to unlock another spell, you won't acquire it. There's no space for it to go anywhere because you have no room left, which is stupid enough, but instead of the game telling you that you need to drop something first, your points get spent anyway and you're left without the spell you just spent them on (I.E., you literally wasted them on nothing).
- Sareth can't run backwards. He can't jog backwards. He can't walk quickly backwards. In fact, you'd think he's being ordered by a cop for a sobriety test to put one foot carefully behind the other for all the leisure he takes in it. In other words, never move backwards in combat, not ever. Always run forward and strafe. This movement mechanic sucks to no end, but you just have to learn to deal with it.
- There's the issue of the almighty kick. If you're fighting enemies on a ledge, whether they're the lowly black guards toward the beginning, the battle-hardened orcs, the vicious ghouls, the infuriated vampire knights, it doesn't matter. One kick and off they go, screaching to their deaths. They rarely avoid the kick, and if it connects and there's a drop of any kind five feet or less behind them, they automatically go ragdoll and fly off as though they just got rammed by a bull. I avoid doing this too often because it feels cheap and doesn't stay in character with the rest of the game where opponents are rarely ever so easy to kill.
- You'll need to fight alongside a female character in the game at a few points, and it's never fun. She has to stay alive or you fail, and you can't accidentally hit her or she'll turn on you and you fail. She dies very easily, and even makes it simpler for the enemies by running right up in front of them sometimes, despite the fact that she only uses ranged spells (tiny, weak fireballs that barely tickle them) and no weapons so she should be staying as far away as possible. Luckily, the other half of the times she's alongside you, you can tell her to stay put while you go on by yourself to clean everything out of the way.
Overall, the game is kind of good, and that's it. It's a game worth playing in my opinion, but don't expect it to be stupendous. My post here has mostly pointed out the flaws with the game (though I haven't touched on quite all of them); there are other positive aspects that help to redeem it. But there are too many things that drag it down, and too many ways that what is good about it could have been better. The one thing that truly saves the game, in my opinion, is that it does provide you with first-person, fantasy action unlike and above what you'll find in any other game. So, buy the game, play it, and enjoy what it has to offer, but try not to have any expectations.
you don't expect me to read all that , do you ?I didn't come across any problems when playing apart from the crap storyline and that, but tbh what FPS doesn't have a crap storyline lol.
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