fun, janky FPS combat paired with some of the most embarrassing writing ever seen in a video game. two women follow you around who are both SO desperate for your boring actionman fantasyguy dick and never shut up about how cool and sexy you are the entire time. like they're not even characters outside of how badly they want to fuck, it's so overbearing that it's funny. it's on that anime mobile phone horny gacha advertisement shit. i don't think i've ever cared less about the story in a video game, it's the lamest kind of tabletop nerd fantasy, but i don't think anyone who's played this cares about it either. the game's encounter design and the way you, inevitably, end up using the arena's to score environmental kick kills is the core appeal. and it's fun!!!! i like kicking nerds into: pits, oceans, spikes, fire, and more! most of it feels pretty rough, though. movement and regular combat are very clunky and awkward, stairs are a nightmare, and it has some questionable collision at times - but the time you'll spend with your foot up a dude's rear end is good.

Background: I picked this game up in 2016. Why? I was and remain a fan of 3 things in video games:
1st person sword and shield action games.
Source Engine games
Games which are cheap

First of all, this game is cheap and accessible. I got this on sale for like a single euro, A single euro!! It runs on the source engine, which means that if you own a machine that can process word documents over 10 pages long, you will be able to play this on medium settings.

Story - I heard once that there are people who care about this game's story. If you do care about this story, do not hesitate to contact me, I would like to bully you directly.

Graphics - Pretty world, character models are ugly as sin, but it's okay, I do not care.

What really matters - The game is by far the best first person sword and shield game available on the market. I've been desperately looking for a better one for 4 years. Nothing plays as good as this.

I say this knowing full well that this game plays like garbage. Archer builds heavily drop off by the end of the game when enemies start doing speed before chasing you down. Wizard builds are weak at the start before the magic roid rage at the end of the game, sword and shield is the most balanced all through the game, but only because the enemies will be ready to beat you up at all times.

The game is brutally flawed, and sometimes I wonder about how much better this game could be if it was made on anything more than a shoestring budget in a small studio somewhere in the Mistake of France (or Lyon, as it's better known).

Yet, the more shortcomings the game this game threw at me the more tools it gave me to overcome them. It is a game that begs you to exploit it, and the most fun you will get is when you finally learn its rules and most importantly, to break them.

This is the hardest game to recommend but I would get this on sale if possible. The core gameplay is really fun, kicking dudes around and throwing boxes at them is amazing. I can't stress enough how much fun combat is against humanoid enemies.

You can kick dudes off ledges, into spike racks, and other hazards, you can even kick them into each other. It's a first person swordfighting game where you use the environment way more than any other weapon.

Sadly the game has other types of enemies where these mechanics are basically nonexistent. And to make matters worse, there's a fucking story there too. It's so stupid and generic I really did try to just ignore it, pretend this game is just about some dude that kicks a bunch of dudes into spikes and call it a day.

Also be prepared for crashes, this is an old ass source engine game not made by Valve, so the game will slowly begin to fall apart more and more as time goes on. Near the end I was crashing around every 25 minutes or so.

The game's balancing is awful too. Magic is so hard to use correctly, it's always just better to rely on your sword. Game also goes on way too long, and things get kinda old after the 40 trillionth kick.

Still despite all of that, you can get this on sale for like 5 bucks sometimes, and it's enjoyable enough. Buy this if you love kicking dudes around, funny ragdolls, and completely ignoring the garbage ass story.

I highly recommend this game, if only for the sense of whiplash the combat brings compared to most modern titles. Post-Dark Souls games seem to really focus on enemies which have these long windups and they all make you fight from the backpedal, but Dark Messiah is fast, frantic and chaotic, while still working well enough. It's a bit buggy and there's some annoying stuff to be sure, but there is joy to be found in working within the chaos, being proactive and working with what's given to you in any fight.


The combat is a bit clunky, I think the issue is that some attacks hurt you on every frame of the attack animation, meaning the beginning the swing does damage before even hitting you, which can be frustrating at times. Even then, this is still one of the better combat systems out there even today, if purely because overcoming these issues rarely makes you feel overpowered. You have a lot of tools that are quite strong, but on any but the lowest difficulties, one slip up can mean doing an encounter all over again. Quick planning, constant repositioning: it just feels good.

There's also still enough Arkane-iness too, the secrets may not be as clever but they often use the mechanics which were at your disposal this whole time: bows, jumping, climbing, looking around in the dark. There's also rewards for attentiveness, as the big levels have you revisit certain locations, and as you obtain keys, you are able to unlock doors which were previously locked. This often means obtaining stronger gear earlier than usual.

While some might not fit your build, it might also be an incentive to put some points into a different part of the skill tree and explore the possibilities that provides. This happened to me with magic, as the first piece of armor I found required Magic Affinity. This helped me TREMENDOUSLY when I had to deal with spiders which are vulnerable to fire.

Due to a certain level of annoyance with somewhat unreliable systems, I wouldn't say the game holds up as well as I remembered, but having finished it, I am struggling to think of a first-person melee-focused game that feels like Dark Messiah. It feels like it implements a lot of FPS ideas into the melee systems, there's no dashes or any other moves to get you out of trouble there's just running and weaving between the best positions and thinking of ways to deal with individual threats as fast as possible. There's a lot of fun to be found there, in feeling like you can't ever make a mistake during these tense moments.

Probably one of the best christian games. Fun gameplay mechanics, the way you interact with stuff and use then in combat is like next gen stuff(except the game is old and they never did something similar again), but also pretty janky and I felt the mage playthrough is unbalanced(played on hard) with certain enemies being almost completely resistant to magic and one hit kill you, while others are really easy. Most likely playing as a warrior is more fun.

Also while most level design is great, there are a few really annoying ones(do you like DARK PLACES, JANKY PLATFORMING and GIANT SPIDERS??) that kill my desire to replay it anytime soon. And the story is very deep and ask profound questions like would you rather be with a succubus or an annoying chick that bosses you around?

First half:
Kick and burn everything in your way to death.

Second half:
Try to find your way in obnoxiously designed levels.

Another part of my library that was long cherished, but never finished. It was the first immersive sim (of the 0451 strain) I remember playing, except for perhaps BioShock though my memory of which I started first is fuzzy.

Back then I had been quite surprised by the depth of mechanics and the physicality of it for a first person RPG. With its emphasis on the sandbox and action gameplay skill over stat-mashing, it was a very novel experience for me at the time and it opened me up to the appeal of the genre even more than BioShock did, in a way. Now the genre is one of my favorites.

However, it's apparent upon picking it back up these 10+ years later why I never could finish back in my teen years: the rough edges in the gameplay are many and severe.

Hitboxes are inaccurate and many will activate before their associated animations even start; small bits of geometry can and often will catch the player and cause wonky movement issues; damage itself is all over the place with enemies sometimes taking 30 normal attacks to down and sometimes (sometimes on the exact same character after a reload) take one or two charged attacks and its over.

One of my favorite and surprisingly mild bits of jank involves the many climbable ropes in the game. You eventually get the ability to place them wherever you can shoot into a wooden ceiling and.... well they swing but they don't collide and you can come along for the ride.

Despite all this jank and all the frustration it can occasionally bring, the game is still polished enough that it's really quite enjoyable and even quite visceral when it's working as intended. As it's perhaps most infamous for, kicking enemies to make them ragdoll into spikes or off cliffs really is just a wonderful mechanic. It's effectiveness might have been considered overtuned, but in context it serves as a great release valve for when all the other systems are getting a bit too frustrating.

Story-wise, there's no profound writing here to enthrall you but it isn't quite generic or offensive either. There's just enough complexity to the delightfully edgy plot to make it intriguing and some of the setpiece moments are fairly memorable, especially for their time. I mean, I was still thinking about the game over 10 years later, so the proof is there even if the pieces don't seem to add up.

It's a story that takes itself seriously but not too seriously. And so, instead of getting hung up on the parts that don't work quite so well, I spent more time thinking about the bits that were better than expected.

Visually, despite definitively looking "aged" at this point, the game did so with a surprising amount of grace for a 2006 title. It even supports modern display resolutions and refresh rates thanks to it being based on the Source Engine and despite it not being nearly as well maintained as the rest of the source catalogue.

One major sticking issue with the game technically is that it has a tendency to crash to desktop somewhat randomly. You can consult the PC Gaming Wiki for a fix that resolves most of it: a "large memory address aware" patch that makes it not explode everytime its memory usage nears 2-3GB.

It's not a total fix, but I only crashed maybe a total of 8-10 times over the 10 hour campaign with that patch on which is a much, much lower rate than in the 15 minutes I tried without it. 😂

So, with all that said I'd readily recommend this to any fans of the immersive sim genre, espcially anyone who enjoys the original Deus Ex because the combat is still better than that (that's not a jab at Deus Ex, its just truth). For everyone else, you're better off picking up Dishonored, their fabulous followup title.

It would be nice to see another swords & sorcery immersive sim outing in the near future, though. Or maybe there's one I missed.....

So according to many "experts" this is supposed to be a masterpiece? Don't make me laugh^^ Well, kicking the enemies away is fun and the physics in combat are generally quite funny...for about 5 minutes ;D Unfortunately, the game has major weaknesses in most areas. The quality of the level design varies wildly, sometimes quite nice, sometimes absolutely confusing and crap (looking at you - spider temple), the story is absolute garbage and the dialog is written so incredibly awkward and crappy, it almost hurt. This whole idea of "freedom of choice" is also super shallow and clichéd...what a disappointment...I thought I'd left this "masterpiece" lying around in my backlog for too long but honestly, I haven't missed anything here.

Although this game tries pretty hard to be a tight RPG with an interesting skill based system it fails at establishing a punishment for those who abuse certain mechanics, which probably everyone had fun with. And while there's nothing wrong with a broken game it kinda defines Dark Messiah in the "kicking" game that it kind of is, there's more to it but kicking is just way too strong. The story is also somewhat unbearable at times, the two women who fall for you are completely obsessed in many non subtle ways and it kind of builds up something that doesn't exist. Overall though it's pretty tongue in cheek and cheesy so I guess it gets a pass. It's still very fun so I'd recommend it but don't expect anything too deep

People like to call this game a kicking simulator, but they don't realize the potential that kicking truly has. You can kick enemies off a cliff or down a flight of stairs. You can kick a barrel into an enemy to knock them down and open them up to a melee instant kill attack. Even beyond the kicking you can play with the physics in a lot of fun ways like cutting the rope on a chandelier and turning it into a wrecking ball, or casting an ice spell on the ground to make enemies slip and ragdoll all over the place. The game does struggle with boss fights and larger combat encounters, but the good parts really outweigh those. I will say the game was really unstable on my PC, but I don't know if that's just a side effect of trying to run it on modern hardware or if it was always prone to crashing.

It's pretty fun at first but overstayed its welcome despite its relatively short length.

The physics-driven stuff is still very charming, and the rope bow is excellent when it works. Some of the best-feeling first-person melee combat to this day, despite the poor balance. It's a blast at first, but it isn't deep enough to really demand any kind of mastery of the systems at play. Kicking orcs off cliffs is neat, but by hour ten you'll almost certainly grow tired of it.

The story is mediocre and its two-dimensional female characters exist only as sad attempts to titillate the player. Dark Messiah's contemporaries in 2006 alone put it to shame in these regards. It's not terrible enough to sour the game entirely, but it doesn't do it any favors, either.

Still, some fun can be had kicking and ice-flooring, even if only for a short while. For those video game academics interested in Arkane's history, it may still hold some appeal solely as a look at the bedrock upon which games like Dishonored were built. Give it a try if you can get it as part of a Steam sale, where it can be had for very, very cheap.

This game's greatest legacy is its ambitious approach to first person melee combat, and while it doesn't totally get there with everything it sets out to do, it's a shame no one else has really picked up the torch on this and ran with it.

The actual level design leaves quite a lot to be desired if i'm honest. Maybe it's the generic fantasy setting, but none of the environments really spoke to me in the same way I'd expect from Arkane's later titles.

In terms of narrative, Dark Messiah probably has the worst story in a video game i have ever played that I can remember. The plot is a nothing burger and the voice acting/dialogue is atrocious, and I hate every character every time they open their mouth.

Please note I rate games on a scale where one star means it was enjoyable with issues. Bad games don’t even get stars.

what an innovative and fun game! Sneak, slash, and freeze your way through a world of fantastic OSHA violations as you explore a paint by numbers (but fun!) fantasy story.

This is a wonderful immersive sim, and anyone who played thief, dishonored, etc should play this.

However, it has a few minor but grating issues that will rub you raw by the end. You will die to stupid rope jumps. You will experience failing to climb a low edge because you didn’t look up enough. It’s minor but it’s frequent, and on top of it the game crashes often even with a 64 bit patch.

Finally, my main criticism of dark messiah is that the final stretch of the game has sections where stealth is impossible despite being almost entirely specced into stealth. It was still fun being an assassin but I’d prefer not to be forced into combat for a prolonged period like that.

Seriously, play it though. Best first person combat I’ve ever experienced, and definitely will play through it again.