I have not played any of the previous Might and Magic games. From what I gather, though, the series has been delighting fans for twenty years, dating all the way back to the original Might and Magic: Book I in 1986. Since buying the rights, Ubisoft has attempted to restart the franchise with its recent Heroes of Might and Magic V and the game I'm reviewing today, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (DMMM).
DMMM is quite a departure for the series, as I understand it, breaking away from its roots in the role-playing (RPG) and turn-based strategy genres to provide a thoroughly first-person action game. Its setting is medieval/fantasy, featuring goblins, orcs, wizards, and many of the other usual standards. Although the game has much of the feel of a first-person shooter (FPS), its RPG elements are far deeper than typical FPS fare, which makes it quite an interesting hybrid right from the outset.
On the whole, the visuals are excellent. The environments are beautifully detailed and a true pleasure to behold, in no small part thanks to the wonderful subtleties of the high-dynamic range (HDR) lighting. It wasn't until after I had invested quite a few hours that I noticed some very nice touches, such as the gamma correction values changing when looking into or away from a bright light source. Stay in darkness for a time, and your "vision" will adjust; similarly, look into the sun then look away, and you'll notice a subtle brightening of the surrounding area as your "eyes" recover. Truly the lighting is top notch if you have the right equipment.
The texture work is very good, the modeling is highly detailed, and the character animations are quite fluid. I particularly liked the realistic ways enemies move when attacking and defending. The animations for the cyclops are a bit too limited—he doesn't really turn but rather works his legs while "magically" rotating in place—but this is a minor complaint. Trust me, when you're facing a cyclops, that will be the last thing on your mind.
Interestingly, my greatest kudos for the visuals are earned by the developers' decision to use them to suck the player into the game. The inclusion of visible bodily surfaces in cut scenes and general action, the way arms and legs swing when running, the way weapons are sheathed and used, and similar visual elements draw the player into the game world and connect him with his avatar. I've seen a handful of other games do this with varying degrees of success, but DMMM is the very best of the best.
I must confess I found the head bobbing and view jerking to be distracting at first, but it quickly faded into the background reality of the game and helped my mind become a part of the world. It gives the game a viscerally real feeling, and that is a huge achievement. On more than one occasion I found myself leaning in my chair, trying to look around a corner, or hunkering down when using stealth, even snapping my head back to avoid incoming fire. I've done such things on rare occasion with other games, but DMMM's bodily presence regularly had me living in the game world.
The only substantive complaint I can level against the visuals is their price. Despite my system's dual, NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX video cards, my system doesn't have the horsepower to run the game with everything cranked up to the max. I could run the game nicely at 1600 x 1200 with HDR as long as I didn't enable anti-aliasing or turn up the water reflections beyond simple. The game does look extraordinarily good with those few concessions, but I do notice a few jagged edges from time to time. Thankfully, I am able to set anisotropic filtering to 8x, so textures blend very smoothly with distance. Just be advised that you're going to want some serious horsepower to do the game justice.
The audio is a mix of the good and bad. The good is immediately obvious: the music is as lovely as it is appropriate, the sound effects are very good, and the voice acting is better than average. Some of the delivery is a bit flat, I think, but that's better than the over-the-top hamming it up in some games.
The only major drawback to the audio is the repetitive nature of enemy speech. Virtually every blackguard yells "Hey pal!", while virtually every orc grunts "Stranger go to meet his dragon!" (or something like that). Suffice it to say that those phrases begin to wear on the player rather quickly. I don't get why audio so often gets shorted when it comes to speech.
I'm sad to report that the audio implementation is also plagued by the stuttering bug known to be common with the Steam engine. Even the latest releases of the technology for Half-Life 2 have failed to fix the issue completely, despite quite a bit of attention from Valve (if we're to believe their press releases). Thankfully, the game's audio stutters for me only when loading/saving, so it doesn't affect game play much. It's merely an irritation, albeit one we could all do without. It's ridiculous that we have to put up with audio stuttering in this day and age, given the sheer computing horsepower involved.
I have a love/hate relationship going with the interface. On the one hand, I love the simplicity. Beyond the basic set of keys there is only the action bar to contend with, which is easily configuration and useable via the mouse or keyboard shortcuts. Yet on the other hand, I really wish for another way to use stuff. The action bar fills up pretty quickly, and there are far more useful items and spells than will fit.
Because double-clicking something in your inventory uses it, I found I could arrange some items there for reasonably quick access. And I eventually discovered a neat "trick", insofar as you can drop spells into inventory slots just like anything else. When playing my mage, I had all his second string spells added to his inventory for quick tab+double-click access in the middle of a fight, but I would have much preferred being able to bind keys.
I should also note that it took me quite a while to discover that right-clicking cancels a pending use. Perhaps that's in the manual (or obvious to others), but I didn't realize I could do that. I found it very useful when playing an assassin because it helped me avoid making noise by sheathing my daggers without striking. Prior to discovering it, I had to swing and hope I didn't hit anything.
The one substantive criticism I can level against the interface is the way switching weapons works when wielding a shield. As one might imagine, it's a pain to have to hit two keys to switch to a sword and shield, so the developers implemented a shortcut: selecting the shield is supposed to select the last one-handed weapon used in conjunction with it. In theory, this allows the player to switch to a sword/shield combination with a single key press, which is more important in combat than it might seem.
In practice, however, it always gets "stuck". Once I found the sword of the dragonclaw, for example, hitting the key to select my shield would bring up the shield alone while my character would make some comment about how the sword sure is a great weapon but he can't use it yet, even though I hadn't tried to equip it! And since I couldn't drop the dragonclaw sword—it appears to bind irrevocably to the player's inventory on pickup—I was doomed to hit two keys to select a sword and shield (and listen to that stupid comment) for the rest of the game.
Similarly, with a different character I once hit a key to select my shield after having dropped the sword with which it was used last. The result was that my character whipped out the blacksmith hammer he had picked up at the first forge instead. I thought that was merely comical until the next time I selected my shield. From that point forward, selecting my shield always selected that bloody useless hammer. Even after dropping the hammer I couldn't get a different weapon to be drawn automatically when selecting a shield, so I was again stuck hitting two keys for the rest of the game. That's irritating.
On the whole, though, the interface is simple and functional. I found myself wishing for a few more configuration options, and a couple less bugs, but its simplicity remains quite appealing overall.
This is where DMMM really shines. Its game mechanics have a bit of a learning curve, or at least they did for me, but once I got the hang of things I started having a ball. First, I love the ability to leverage the environment. I have to admit it's a bit weird to find such a surplus of metal spikes and perilously fragile platforms—there obviously aren't any building codes in the world of DMMM—but I can overlook the oddness for the options they provide in combat.
I've heard some complaints that such things make combat too simple, but in my estimation they merely make it more fun. Yes, I can often take the easy way out of a fight by kicking my opponents off a cliff, knocking them into a fire, kicking them backward into spikes, or just smacking them in the head with anything that isn't nailed down. But there are three reasons why I don't think this is a problem: (1) you aren't forced to do it, (2) it isn't always easy to do such things, especially when you're first starting with the game, and (3) it just never gets old!
Seriously, I never tired of booting some hapless orc off the side of a mountain. I never tired of slamming some blackguard into spikes. I never tired of breaking barrels over necrolords' heads. If you want more of a challenge, then don't make use of the spikes, fires, and what not. Play the game on hard and avoid kicking your foes off cliffs. I don't think it makes the combat too easy at all; it just provides icing on the cake for those who want it.
I will say this much about the kicking: it's a bit too binary. From the "wrong" distance/angle, a well-placed kick will knock a guy back maybe six inches, tops. Yet at the
"right"
distance/angle, he'll get slammed back ten feet into the fire, spikes, or booted off a cliff! That's just too weird. I wish the kicking were a bit more consistent, but I guess if I had to choose between kicking and consistency I would leave things as they are. I can live with the weirdness in exchange for the joy of kicking enemies to their doom (grin).
Second, the skill trees are fantastic! DMMM provides the player with a set of choices that actually matter, yet there don't seem to be any bad choices. Some skills are less useful than others—I didn't find burglary to be worth the points when I tried it—but none of them are outright bad choices, and none of them back the player into a corner from which he cannot escape. Best of all, the different paths through the skill trees provide a very different playing experience for different types of characters.
My first time through the game I played a warrior, so I focused on the combat skills and avoided the magic tree almost completely. I avoided the critical hit boosts on the (bad) advice of a game guide, but I maxed out strength, endurance, melee attacks, ranged attacks, etc. Sure enough, my warrior turned into a tank in a pretty big hurry. He had a hard time at certain spots in the game, but the key to his eventual success was in adapting his strengths to the situation.
My second time through the game I played a mage and focused almost exclusively on magic. The play experience was radically different. My mage got stuck in certain places too, but they were completely different spots, and the ultimate solutions were nothing like those employed by my warrior. I rarely find RPG games live up to their claims of replayability, but the skill system in DMMM certainly does.
My third time through the game I played an assassin, and I couldn't believe how much different it was. I fully expected that being an assassin would amount to lame bits of stealth layered on top of largely the same experience as my warrior. But boy was I wrong! Because the assassin wears much lighter armor, and because I selected the critical hit skills from the combat tree, my assassin was a very different character than I had played before.
I absolutely loved making my way down through the final chapters. I had problems there with both my warrior and my mage, but my assassin breezed through it all. Thanks to his stealth skills, he was able to kill most opponents before they even knew he was there. On the few occasions that he slipped up or otherwise got into a big furball, his critical hit boost (roughly 10% thanks to his ring, weapons, and skills) coupled with the speed afforded by light armor made it possible for him to strike with devastating power and disengage quickly. It made for positively frenetic combat that had me on the edge of my seat.
Because of this, I think DMMM handles stealth extremely well. The problem with stealth in so many other games (e.g., Thief, Splinter Cell, etc.) is that the mechanics are so unforgiving. All too often one wrong move spells certain death, insofar as the characters can't hold their own with multiple bad guys aware of their presence. In contrast, DMMM's assassin isn't a pushover by any stretch of the imagination. He can't hang tough like a full-blown warrior, but he's tough enough to stay alive when things go wrong, which is great!
My biggest complaint with the skill system is that warriors get the short end of the stick. Taking all the combat skills gives you a whopping three, worthwhile combo moves, which doesn't even compare to the dozen or so spells mages get. It is precisely the depth of its combat system that has kept my all-time favorite game, Blade of Darkness (BoD), at the top of my list. I've yet to find a game that provides melee combat with anything approaching its depth; I was hoping that DMMM might surpass it in that regard, but it clearly doesn't. BoD had character and weapon specific combo moves, the net result of which was a large and delightful set of choices. DMMM gives you a mere three melee combos.
Along similar lines, more could be done with assassins. They have one basic stealth-kill animation, which does get a little old, and they don't have any of the gadgets one might expect. When I think of assassins in a medieval setting, I think of poison-tipped darts, traps, katar "punch daggers", chakram (though this is largely the stuff of fiction, not actual, assassinations), flash powders, and a host of other great tools that could have upped the ante. What the game does provide is great, but I think there remains quite a bit of untapped potential for the assassin.
Still, despite what I've said, the combat system rocks! Obviously, I don't think it's as good as it could have been with more combos for the warrior and more tools for the assassin, but it's a lot of fun nevertheless. You can choose to flail wildly with the "flurry of blows" attack, but this doesn't do all that much damage and is easily parried. Queuing up more powerful attacks is definitely the way to go, and since one's movement direction determines the ultimate swing it pays to think ahead.
Ultimately, attacks of any kind lead to an "adrenaline" charge, which can be used in a variety of ways. Unleashing it with a bow spells instant death at a distance. Unleashing it with a sword rewards the player with one of a number of different results. I absolutely loved it when my warrior would impale an enemy on his sword so deeply that it required kicking him off, all in glorious, blood-soaked slow motion. Unleashing it in a lightning bolt spells chain-lightning death for anyone unlucky enough to be in front of the player. Unleashing it in a fireball means explosive death for anyone in a non-trivial radius. And, of course, my personal favorite: unleashing it with telekinesis means you get to pick up an enemy and hurl him literally hundreds of feet, usually killing anything and everything in his path. The adrenaline mechanic is the purest sort of Big Fun™.
Third in the plus column is the ability to forge weapons. It's quite an underused mechanic, insofar as I believe it turns up exactly three times throughout the game, but it does allow the adventurous player to make his own goodies. And they do matter! My warrior was able to forge a long sword, whose +3 to damage was better than the +2 weapon he was carrying at the time. Similarly, he was later able to forge the earth sword, or something like that, which does an enormous amount of fire damage. That sword, coupled with a lightning shield, allowed him to wade through most of the bad guys in the later chapters with absolutely impunity.
It would have been an even better mechanic if some means were provided to forge daggers, armor, or perhaps carve staves. As it is, it seems geared largely to warrior types. Perhaps it was intended to help make up for the lack of combo moves? I don't know. What I do know is that it's fun to forge weapons; it's just not as useful as it could be.
Fourth and finally, I have to give the developers a lot of credit for something few games do: making the undead both interesting and challenging. Undead creatures like zombies, skeletons, and so forth are so overused and yet so underwhelming, it's hard for me to believe that games even bother to include them. In most games they shuffle about too slowly to be a serious threat, and are largely nothing more than time-wasting fodder. DMMM actually makes them an interesting foe, thanks to their ability to vomit poison. They're tough as nails, and they hit pretty hard; add that to their poison ability, and the undead aren't pushovers.
I did eventually discover that I could take most of them down with a well-placed arrow or two to the neck/head, which reduced the poison-annoyance factor, and it actually made something of an unintended mini-game out of facing down zombies with a bow. Suffice it to say that DMMM actually does something worthwhile and entertaining with the undead, and that's pretty rare in the gaming world.
In summary, the game mechanics are a great fusion of RPG and FPS elements. You'll be faced with meaningful choices, which will greatly affect how the action plays out in each encounter. And there are enough different ways to play to make the game fresh and new far beyond the first play-through.
Every review I've read has slagged the game for giving too much of the story away too early, so I have to begin my commentary with a confession: I must be an idiot. Or at least, that's all I can figure, given that every other reviewer apparently figured out the major plot twists roughly ten seconds into the opening cinematics. Me, I absolutely loved the vision/dream sequences that showed me conflicting versions of past events. That was a great touch, insofar as it made me doubt what I really knew.
And although I don't want to spoil the surprise about Xana, I will say I reacted with physical revulsion when I learned the truth. It literally tied my stomach in a knot. I didn't anticipate the ultimate truth about my character either, and that was quite a surprise to me as well. I thought the story unfolded rather well, hitting me in the stomach with the twists at just the right moments.
For the record, I am the guy you don't want to watch movies with, because I often figure out what's going to happen within the first few minutes. I've gotten so good at reading what the director is telling us from the opening minutes of a film that my wife has taken to asking me my predictions. And without boasting I can say that I am right more often than I'm wrong. The point of all this is to say that I'm not generally oblivious; I usually pick up on stuff pretty quickly. But for whatever reason I was happily blind sided by DMMM's story arc. Take that as you will.
Regarding the quality of the story arc, I think it's a good one. It gives the player more than enough reason to forge through the game to see its ending. It makes the player care about the choices he makes. My only real complaint is that the choices ultimately turn out to be pretty meaningless from a player's perspective. There are a total of four endings, and I've seen them all; I can say with confidence that they aren't sufficiently different for me to care one way or the other.
Quite honestly, I felt cheated when I finished with my evil mage. He chose not to reject Xana, and he chose the path of evil in the final analysis. I was expecting some kind of payoff cut-scene with Xana, just as I was expecting something quite different than what I had seen from rejecting Xana and choosing good. What I got was a barely altered version of the ending I had already seen. So the story is worthwhile, but don't expect to be satisfied by its ending cinematic; the payoff just isn't there.
First, the good stuff. The game consists of nine-plus chapters, which vary greatly in their length and complexity. I estimate total playing time for the single-player campaign is roughly ten to fifteen hours, though that will obviously vary with the gamer and his approach. I played pretty conservatively my first time through, largely because I was having a really hard time getting the combat system. I was getting killed a lot because I wasn't making good use of the environment and wasn't making good use of my skills, so that slowed me down considerably. I figure most people will do as well or better than I will; I sometimes have mental blocks with certain games, and DMMM was one of them. In contrast, I made it through the first five chapters in an hour and a half during my fourth run-through; obviously, I've gotten better.
No matter how you slice up that content, though, there's more than enough to be a good value compared to other games. Plenty of FPS games clock in these days at under ten hours and are far less replayable. DMMM will stay fresh for at least a second play-through, if not a third for most people. The different skills and equipment alter the experience significantly enough that DMMM has some legs.
Second, the arsenal and the bestiary are both stocked well enough to have a good time. You'll face blackguards (archers and swordsmen), spiders (from tiny to monstrous), cyclops, dragons, goblins, orcs, zombies, zombie-fied humans, necrolords, ghouls, liches, vampire knights, and the game's big, bad, end boss himself. And although there are only three types of weapons (staves, daggers, and swords), there are a fair number of variants. And don't sell the magic users short: they have access to quite a few spells, none of which are uninteresting, pace other reviewers.
Third, the content of the skills system is extremely cool. I've already praised it for providing good replay value, but I haven't said much about the skills themselves. In the combat tree there's a key choice between two paths, both of which meet ultimately in a second adrenaline bar. One path focuses squarely on melee combat, with options to unlock new combos or boost strength for more damage. The other begins with archery, which is useful to any character, and continues with boosting one's chance to score a critical hit, which has been much maligned by what I've read.
Honestly, I don't know what game other people have been playing, but my experience with DMMM tells me that the critical hit boosts are as useful as they are fun. My assassin spent a lot of time with an elven bow (+5 to damage and +3% to critical hit) and a superior naga silksword (+6 to damage and +4% to critical hit), which made an excellent companion to his critical hit-boosting skills and ring of the weaponmaster (+2% to critical hit). All told, he typically had a 9% - 10% boost to his chance to critical hit, which makes more of a difference than one might think.
I found that the critical hit boosts typically paid off at least once in big fight, and when they do it's obvious: bad guys go flying! If you score a critical hit with a melee weapon, then you might end up killing anyone else standing nearby. And I've laughed myself silly when scoring a critical hit with a bow, which can literally pick up its target and turn him into a wall-ornament with shocking force. It's not the kind of thing you can count on, unlike strength and combos, but it's welcome indeed. My assassin did particularly well with it, insofar as it got him out of more than one scrape virtually untouched.
Similarly, though plenty of reviewers have written off the basic flame arrow and the basic freezing spell, I found both to be quite helpful. The flame arrow remains useful throughout the game as a cheap means of killing spiders quickly from a distance, particularly when coupled with oil. The next time you have a pack of spiders coming after you, chuck a flask of oil to the ground in front of them and light it up; that's the fastest, cheapest means of which I'm aware to kill a whole pack of spiders with a single attack.
The basic freezing spell is just as useful and even more fun, particularly when you're fighting on stairs and cliffs. Yes, you can use it to freeze an enemy for a few seconds (or permanently in the case of adrenaline), but its main use is to knock people down. Cast it under their feet, and your foes will fall to the ground. You can often use it strategically, so that they fall to their deaths, but you can at the very least impale them when they're down which is fatal to many opponents.
My advice is that you ignore all the negative reviewers. I almost believed them; they almost prevented me from buying the game. It was only because of my experience with the demo that I decided to give it a try, and I am very glad I did. I find all of the skills are useful, though some (e.g., poison resistance and burglary) arguably aren't worth their cost for most playing styles.
Finally in the plus column, the developers deserve kudos for the fighting AI. The shield-chewing bad guys did more than just run and hack; they parried, they seemed to work in teams, and some even dodged attacks and kicks pretty well. The goblins were predictably incompetent, but the vampire knights were downright fearsome, especially in groups. Frankly, the only substantive glitch I observed with the enemy AI was that spiders could get stuck in place when crawling toward me on a surface other than the floor. I wasn't able to divine any sort of pattern, but I could always tell when it would happen: the spider would suddenly stop moving and be un-killable. Thankfully, I never saw that sort of thing for any of the enemies that must be defeated to continue the story.
Speaking of glitches, DMMM has a fair number of flaws, some of which are game-breakers. There are workarounds in every case, but the game could benefit greatly from another patch. Given Ubisoft's general track record, though, I think it's as good as it's going to get. They don't exactly have a history of shipping quality games or fixing them after the fact. Having said that, I have catalogued the following nasty bugs during my time with DMMM:
Obviously, the game is of less than stellar quality, which is what I have (sadly) come to expect from Ubisoft. Also in the negative column is the fact that the game play is almost completely linear. It's not a deal breaker by any stretch, nor does it diminish the experience much, but it would have been cool to have some meaningful options. Yes, I do realize that a couple of the quests are optional, but they don't make much of a difference. They provide options, but they don't provide meaningful options.
Speaking of a lack of meaningful options, the overall choice to be good or evil isn't well realized in the game. The ending you see depends essentially upon two choices: (1) do you accept or reject Xana, and (2) do you choose to do good or evil with the skull of shadows. I've already mentioned that the endings aren't sufficiently different, but here my complaint is more that good and evil just don't turn up in the game otherwise. Ok, that's not entirely fair, there is one room that heals good characters while hurting evil characters, and the ultimate weapons against the undead are available only if you reject Xana, but those are pretty thin consequences.
Worse, the game doesn't offer much to the evil player. I'm not big on playing evil characters in the first place, but if you're going to create a game that gives player a real choice, then it's disingenuous not to provide the "rewards" to both approaches. The game would have made a lot more sense, for example, if the player who chooses to accept Xana gets some kind of suitably wicked cut-scene at the end game; she talked up how she could be "something more" throughout the whole game, so it made no sense that there isn't at least some closure as to her relationship with the protagonist.
Similarly, the character who chooses to accept Xana is denied the most powerful weapons in the game. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense if the protagonist were granted control over the undead as a trade off? I mean, if you're going to choose evil, there has to be some benefit to doing it, right? Jedi don't go dark merely for the color of their light saber; they go dark because the power to force-choke/lightning your enemies to death is more than a bit handy. It would have made a lot of sense in the game for the protagonist to find himself able to control the dead, or something suitably wicked, if he makes the choice for evil.
Overall, though, the game's content is very compelling. I realize I've enumerated quite a list of bugs, and I've said that the endings just aren't sufficiently different to satisfy. But DMMM is one of those rare games that comes along every so often, a game that's so good that its failings are felt all the more keenly. As it is, DMMM is a great game; I complain largely because it could have been a brilliant game. I similarly criticized BoD because it got so much right yet failed to fix basic problems. In other words, don't take these criticisms as deal-breakers; take them in context with the rest of what I've said about how good the game is. I found DMMM to be a great deal of fun despite its shortcomings.
Wow! It isn't often that I play a game these days, finish its single-player aspect, and then find myself playing a very different game with its multi-player aspect. For most games, their multi-player aspects consist of tweaked, single-player maps with other avatars running around. This is the standard for FPS games, and it's been done to death. With DMMM, though, you're getting a new experience.
First of all, DMMM ships with plenty of game modes to keep your interest. The basic deathmatch and team deathmatch are there, but the crusade mode is really where DMMM shines in online play. Borrowing from Battlefield 2's (BF2) conquest mode, DMMM's crusade mode pits humans against undead in a battle to capture and hold territory. When one side captures enough points, the other team's ticket count will begin bleeding dry. Respawning also costs tickets, so the game is going to end at some point.
But in crusade, unlike BF2, the ending is only the beginning of the next map. The point of crusade isn't to wage war on a single map, where a fickle turn of fate or map exploits can rule the day; no, the point of crusade is to battle across a number of maps to reach the enemy's stronghold. All the while players gather experience, based on their performance, which allows them to level up their character, which may be a warrior, archer, mage, assassin, or priestess.
What really blew me away was the degree to which the single-player aspect taught me enough about the game that I was ready for its multi-player aspect, yet I had obviously become a stranger in a strange land. None of the skills worked quite as I expected. The result is a game that feels quite fresh and new, yet again!
I'm sad to say I have seen some lag issues, and it seems that combat sounds sometimes don't fire as they should—I know I've whacked people with my sword and heard nothing, despite my status meter showing a bunch of damage—but the bugs aren't showstoppers. I've heard that there are server-disconnection bugs, which would be doubly disturbing given that they would wipe out hard-won experience, but I've not personally encountered them. I'm told there is also a lightning-orb exploit, which allows mage characters to dominate certain maps completely, but I haven't run into that yet either.
I would normally spend more time with a game's multi-player aspect before I would post my review, but DMMM is one of those rare games in which I have sufficient confidence after a rather short time. It's not perfect, but it's the best melee/magic action game online right now. And frankly, I think it holds up quite well when compared even with juggernauts like BF2. DMMM fosters team play through the different classes, has a great RPG experience system, is highly playable and enjoyable thanks to the Steam engine, and even has built-in voice over IP for team communication.
In short, although I don't expect DMMM's multi-player aspect to be as long lived as BF2, or other higher-profile multi-player-focused games, it is most certainly not the mere afterthought that multi-player is for so many other games. No, DMMM's multi-player aspect is engaging, quite different from its single-player aspect, and very refreshing. It's something genuinely new under the sun, and its novelty alone would be sufficient for it to be worthwhile.
Every other review of DMMM I read drew a similar conclusion: it's not all that great to begin with, insofar as it's just a bunch of repetitive combat, and it has lots and lots of flaws. In contrast, my signature line for the conclusion of this review is: I have no idea what sort of crack the other reviewers were smoking, because DMMM is a great game!
DMMM is the first game since BoD that I haven't been able to put down. I played through it as a good warrior and literally started my second play through as an evil mage seconds after I finished. I had even more fun on my second play through, which is probably why I started my third play through immediately after finishing. My third play through, as a "good" assassin, was, quite surprisingly, still more fun.
I can hardly believe it, but I finished my third play through a few nights ago and started playing again for a fourth time! I had been telling myself over and over that I would take a break, that I would play something else, that I would walk away from it. But then as I sat there contemplating what I might do with the precious moments of gaming time left to me, there was only one game I really wanted to play. So I fired up DMMM and started over yet again.
This time I'm playing a good warrior again, though I'm going to allocate his skills quite differently than I did during my first play through. And as hard as it is for me to believe, I'm having still more fun on my fourth trip through the game than I did on my first three. I'm so much better with the combat system, and I understand all the different skills and choices so much better now, that I'm having a blast with it in ways I couldn't have before.
For more than five years now, my all-time favorite game has been BoD. And even though DMMM doesn't have the kind of deep, engrossing combat system that BoD had, it has a broader set of skills, a more engaging pace, more forgiving and more interesting mechanics, and a solid multi-player aspect. As such, I am surprised to say that I am finally removing BoD from my hard drive. I've gone back to it time and time again, but DMMM has usurped its title as my all-time favorite game. It's just that much fun.
Just as with BoD, though, I can't recommend DMMM without qualification. DMMM has a learning curve, though it's not particularly steep. Still, I could imagine those with extraordinarily short attention spans being frustrated until they get the combat system. DMMM is also a somewhat mature game. More than one of the cut scenes features near-nudity, and the combat is blood-spurting violence, often up close and personal. The themes of this game aren't consistently adult, but a fair bit of the content simply isn't for little kids. Perhaps I'm overly sympathetic to Plato, but I agree with him that young children should be exposed only to the very best of stories.
Also, because DMMM merges the RPG and FPS genres, diehards in both camps are likely to be disappointed. RPG veterans will probably be put off by the lack of story depth and meaningful choices for influencing the ending. Similarly, FPS diehards will probably be put off by the complexity of the melee combat. Still, I should think that the majority of persons in both camps would find something to enjoy in DMMM.
In the final analysis, then, I can recommend DMMM to any adult (or late teen) with a penchant for medieval combat wholeheartedly. I can also recommend it more broadly to anyone who likes a good action game and is willing to spend a little time getting into the swing of things. For my part, I think DMMM is the best game I've played in all of 2006 and is, in fact, the game from which I've garnered the most enjoyment overall, which is why it's my new, all-time favorite. But I do realize this has a lot to do with my predilection for bloody, melee-based carnage (grin).
At any rate, as long as you're not in one of the categories I've already excluded, I encourage you to pick up a copy. I think DMMM will easily be worth your money, and it just may turn out to be a big hit with you too.
01/02/2007