Now Playing: Dark Messiah

The copy of Dark Messiah that I bought yesterday leaves me no choice but to bitch. I really wanna like this game, but in the first 10 minutes of the game I’ve already died a dozen times and am stuck because apparently, I need some degree in Fantasy Ladder Climbing to get up a ladder that *might* save me from a quickly approaching zombie thing that came out of nowhere and I can’t quite defend against. Instead, I keep running into the ladder with nothing happening and get killed again and again. Apparently I’m not the only person this is happening to, and apparently it’s a bug. A bug where you can’t climb a ladder on the critical path ten minutes into the game?! You got to be kidding me.

Let’s not even get into the fact that I first installed the DVD version, and when it asked me whether I wanted to associate the game with my Steam account (cool, I think, gets the game patched automatically) it did not just associate the game with my Steam account – it downloaded a 2nd copy of the whole game into my Steam directory! Which took about 3 hours.

Maybe I’ve been too spoiled by console releases that work out of the box, or maybe the PC market is really going to hell. Judging by the even small area of shelf space that my local EB now has alloted to PC releases, that’s definitely the case. And who can blame them when consumers have to deal with stuff like this.

On the positive side, this game does look very promising. Can’t wait until I can actually play it! ;(

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I reinstalled the DVD version of Dark Messiah and was able to proceed at the point where I was formerly stuck. Since then, the game has run smoothly and without bugs.

It’s a good game, the first one that has made sword- and other types of melee fighting fun for a long time. Handling those daggers is pretty damn cool. And I find myself going back and forth between all sorts of ways to kill enemies, everything is well done. Graphics are okay, but the environments are kinda bland. Maybe I’m too biased because of Wheel of Time, but I still haven’t seen a fantasy game that has made significant visual leaps and bounds from what WoT offered 7 years ago. The story isn’t terribly intriguing yet, and I get most mission objectives from them telling me “now do this”, not because they naturally flow from the game. But then again I don’t really care once the atmosphere of the current mission grips me.

Fun little game if you expect WoT/Thief and not another Underworld or Arx Fatalis. I’ve read that it gets repetitive later on, but so far I’ve been entertained.