Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on February 20th, 2008

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There's no denying that Dark Messiah has a certain bloody charm, with battles against numerous enemies being both challenging and rather gory. By the end though, things do become a little repetitive, and this prevents the game from being anything truly special. It's also arrived on the Xbox 360 far too late, with recent releases leaving Dark Messiah looking and feeling a little like a budget release. Had the story been stronger and the visuals suitably improved to a level Xbox 360 owners expect, Dark Messiah would have been very easy to recommend. As it stands, it's nowhere near polished enough to be anything more than an enjoyable diversion.

Adding a subtitle hasn't improved Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. This tardy Xbox 360 port of the first-person action RPG that premiered on the PC in late 2006 remains solidly third-rate even with the word "Elements" strangely appended to the original name. Arkane Studios and Ubisoft may have taken well beyond a year to presumably spit-shine everything for the game's console debut, but the mind-numbingly repetitive combat, bland story, and awkward level design haven't been changed much at all. Only revamped multiplayer modes of play offer anything new, and they're pretty weak and offset by control and visual issues that make this 360 version of the game much worse than its PC predecessor.

At its heart, Elements is a straight rehashing of the PC edition of the game. The solo campaign again tells the tale of Sareth, who is wandering the lands of Ashan trying to find the long-lost Skull of Shadows for his mage master, a rather sinister piece of work named Phenrig. And also once again, this story is so poorly told that you can't summon up the will to care about any of the characters or particulars. Everything is hacked together, from the ludicrous goo-goo eyes made between Sareth and his sidekick Leanna to the capital-E evil of bad guys such as Arantir. The only interesting conceit is your attachment to a demonic entity called Xana, and she's such a dumb caricature of a jealous woman that her catty comments will offend even the most hardcore chauvinist. Furthermore, all of the dialogue is delivered in hammy drive-in movie tones (why exactly are medieval knights calling you "pal"?), and the bare bones of the plot are so poorly presented that it's hard to figure out what you're supposed to be doing. You get the feeling that Arkane Studios was going for a grim swords-and-sorcery saga à la Conan but could never settle on taking the whole thing seriously or playing it up for laughs.

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