Dark Messiah: Might and Magic is a good game when it is running well. But it has a nasty habit of "lagging" out after a simple reload. It seems a fairly prevalent bug, that after so many reloads (re-spawning at last save point after a death) the game just lags out, and the sound and audio become extremely choppy, if it's not altogether unplayable. This problem is fairly infrequent (avoided by not dieing repeatedly) and is fixed by restarting your game. There have been some other issues with the character clipping through the level and falling into a bottomless pit. (Happened to me twice in the first 2 hours of playing the game)
The game only has 2 difficulty settings, Normal & Hard. Having found playing on Normal fairly difficult for a 1st time go on the game, I cann't imagine how many times I will die going through on Hard. This inherent difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing, as It does make killing your enemies that much more satisfying. There are many ways in which a player can go about defeating their foes, they can simply hack and slash their way through with a sword, or snipe with a bow. The game encourages creativity, and most rooms have environmental objects in which you can interact with. Most notably there are spikes scattered around most levels, and players can quickly kill enemy units by impaling them onto the spikes. Another technique I found interesting to watch was to cast the freeze spell on the ground, and cause an enemy to rush you, and slip on the icy patch you placed on the floor, you can than finish them off.
Graphics in the game are top notch... although you will need a top of the line system to run all the options at higher resolutions, I've found that my middle of the road system is more than capable of playing the game with most of the eye candy turned up. There are some really interesting and intense levels to play in the game, a personal favorite was the series of levels in which you are chasing a ghoul from roof-top to roof-top, jumping and climbing from ropes to roof tops to other ropes. It took a couple tries to beat the level, but it was defiantly a unique and fun level, and one of the better scripted levels I've played in a game in a long time.
Overall Dark Messiah is a some what unique game. I have found it to be one of the better 1st person Melee/Action RPG games. But there are defiantly some issues with the games performance on my system and other systems. In the end the performance issues truly keep this game from being great.
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