Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements Review

1UP is the latest website to add their two cents on Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements, and like their colleagues they are not impressed. They give the FPS/RPG Xbox 360 port a dismal 3.0/10.

Though most of the control issues lead to boring or just unsatisfying gameplay, the jumping aspects are just plain frustrating…and Dark Messiah has a lot of jumping sections. It’s hard enough to make jumping work well in an FPS, but Dark Messiah makes the annoying seem utterly impossible; not only do you have to jump from ledge to ledge, you must jump from rope to rope as well. Using a Rope Bow to climb to seemingly unreachable ledges sounds cool in theory, but technical problems undermine it in practice. If the rope is even remotely close to a wall, it will clip through it, which makes it impossible to climb. I frequently found myself stuck hanging from a rope, unable to move up, down, or even jump off in desperation. The jumping problems compound the other issues with the game, making the whole experience more of a chore than any videogame should be. There were many sections I had to replay repeatedly, trying to climb past obstacles only to have my progress abruptly halted by ropes that simply did not work properly. This one issue cropped up often enough that it made a tolerably bad game nearly unplayable.

Here’s a quick list of other things that didn’t work properly or were just really lame: The music would completely drop out some of the time, making the dank sewers seem even lonelier; in a boss fight against a goblin named Aratrok, he somehow lost his sword at the beginning of the fight and spent the rest of the match trying to punch me with arms that couldn’t reach; after plowing through a dozen hours against an undead army, when you finally earn your last ability for the Warrior it’s just a four percent chance for a critical hit; there were two boss fights against giant spiders and three against dragons; the final boss flies, so if you’re the Warrior, have fun trying to hit it with your sword; and some of the objectives were a little obscure, such as “Search the Place” or “Don’t let Leanna die or hate you” — I never figured out how she could hate me. And the multiplayer mode feels like an annoyingly slow version of Shadowrun.