Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a decent action adventure. The combat is pretty solid. There's that kicking meme, but it serves its combat utility purpose well enough. Swinging your weapons and performing power attacks and using physics objects against enemies (like creating an avalanche of stuff, or using telekinesis spell to throw objects with greater force) is satisfying. The platforming... admittedly, it's kind of mediocre. My biggest issue is how unbelivably janky the ledge climbing is. Later I discovered that you have to hold down the jump button to climb stuff, I've never seen this implementation of ledge grabbing anywhere else. Even then, Sareth will fail to climb some objects. You also have to sprint to make across some gaps, which doesn't always feel reliable. The fast paced sections where you have to quickly run feel a little trial and errory for my tastes Later on, you obtain a rope bow which allows you to shoot at wooden objects to create ropes to climb them up. Pro-tip: Don't jump onto the rope as soon as it falls, let it straighten itself, otherwise you may find yourself out of bounds, since the rope itself doesn't have collision. Speaking of bugs, I had to fix some compatibility issues that caused crashes, that 4GB issue and Nvidia's Threaded Optimization thing. After which, I've experienced no crashes at all, but be aware of those technical issues. The story... it's kind of basic. The ending in particular felt kind of underwhelming, I chose to purge the demon power, and I think I used the skull to use its power instead of freeing the father, but really, all I did was to plop it at pretty much the same place it's been before (though looking a different direction). The ending cutscene is short and I didn't gain much from it. I guess the world is saved? The game is also relatively short. This isn't necessarily an issue, but a noteworthy observation. The game definitely has rough edges, but the gameplay is fun and engaging enough despite some jank. An interesting spinoff to the Might and Magic series.

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.

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.

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?

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.....

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.

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.

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

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

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.

generic fantasy setting and a garbage story. if you're picking this up, you'll be doing so for the combat.

the combat is great, it definitely feels like it was designed with the capabilities of the source engine in mind. throwing physics objects is an extremely important facet of the gameplay, especially in the early game. it turns the majority of the game's battles into crazy bar fights and i love it.

not every combat encounter is that good though, a lot of fights involving large / non humanoid enemies just arent that fun. the secrets hunting is pretty good though, in spite of the game's linearity. id recommend overall

Before I start here Dark Messiah suffered bad reviews because of all the terrible bugs that launched with the game. now that 2 1/2 years have passed Dark Messiah’s bugs have been pretty much been ironed out and you now have a pretty fun action RPG. Before I start explaining the game DM uses the Half-Life 2 engine so you can expect some wonderful graphics and effects. DM uses the HL2 engine very well, but the engine is a bit supped up so you’ll need a fairly beefy rig to run this game. If your computer was being pushed with HL2 then your computer will have a hard time running this game. I also have to mention that DM felt a lot like Oblivion Lite in the sense that it is set in Medieval times, melee combat is the first person, and the art style is a little like Oblivion (not as unique of course).


You play as a young protagonist named Sareth and you must stop the evil Arantir from using the Skull Crystal and bringing the Dark Messiah back to life. You have a choice to either stop him yourself or let the Dark Messiah live on. The story is actually fairly interesting and will keep you on the edge throughout this 15-20 hour adventure. Now DM is a linear RPG (it’s not free roaming like Oblivion) but makes up for it with an intricate combat system. You have about 30-40 different item slots and you can carry things from health, mana, weapons, magic etc. As you progress through the game you will earn skill points for completing objectives and you can upgrade a variety of things from endurance, health, stealth, archery skill, learn new skills such as heal, fire arrow, freeze, sanctuary etc. There’s a lot to learn and you won’t upgrade 100% in a play through. You can either concentrate on being a Knight, Mage, or Archer or just go down the middle.

There are a variety of unique weapons you can pick up throughout the adventure such as the awesome rope bow (shoot an arrow at any wood overhanging and a rope will come down), ice staffs, flame swords, poison daggers, and even a cool electricity shield that stuns enemies when they attack you. Now there are no shops where you can buy things so everything has to be picked up throughout the world. This keeps the action constantly going, but will disappoint people who are used to having stores in their RPGs.


Combat consists of left clicking for your basic attack, but if you hold it down you do a Power Strike and whether or not you strafe, move forward, or backward will determine whether it’s a sideswipe, impale, or overhead strike. This can let you easily dodge an attack and quickly strike back. You can use the right mouse button to block (and when you get the ability) left clicking to knock enemies back. Hit enough bad guys and you’ll get your adrenaline bar up and this results in a gory slow-mo instant kill. This applies to all weapons and each of them has their own unique advantages to them. You have a kick button and this is great when you are on a ledge so you can just kick them off. Every so often you’ll find spike beds on walls you can impale enemies on, also you’ll find traps that can be kicked down to crush enemies.

While the combat is really fun and you can do a lot with it; it will get repetitive after about halfway through unless you use different weapons and toss things up. Every so often you’ll find a blacksmith room where you can add bars of metal and forge your own weapons. Now when it comes to enemies there aren’t too many of them (knights, undead, spiders, necromancers, evil demons) and that’s about it. They are mixed up a lot, but you still can get bored of them after awhile.


Every so often, though, you will get a great boss fight and these are huge creatures that require key items in the environment to kill them. These are pretty awesome and are very satisfying to take down. My biggest complaint must be the level design. A lot of times you won’t find most of the hidden secret areas since they aren’t even in places you’d remotely think they’d be in. There will be times you’ll wander around for over 30 minutes in the same place wondering where to go and this has to do with poor level design. The levels are very linear, most of the time dark, and really hard to navigate. Other than this Dark Messiah is a pretty good game, and you can even get it off Steam for $10! I highly recommend Dark Messiah to any action RPG fan.