Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements Demo Impressions

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements (DMMM) is best described as a first-person action RPG, fusing the combat style of your typical FPS and together with character customization more commonly found in an RPG.

When you first start the demo you are asked to choose a class. Out of the four classes, Mage, Warrior, Archer, and Assassin, only the Mage and Warrior are available in the demo. As far as I can tell from playing through the fairly short demo, the Warrior is designed for those gamers who prefer button mashing-orientated game play. The Mage class seems more accommodating to those gamers who prefer to think carefully about their tactics and work out the optimum strategy before committing to combat.

As the Warrior I found myself all too often ignoring the special moves and just hitting “attack” as fast as I could. I’m sure in the full game this will only get you so far, but during the demo, button mashing suffices nicely and surprisingly remains fun.

Occasionally, blocking attacks is useful, however with the overabundance of health potions lying around I never felt particularly close to death. As a Mage, you’re first equipped with a stick and soon a fire spell. The stick is about as useful as you would expect a stick to be, so I ignored it for the most part, only reverting back to it when I ran out of mana.

[youtube width="425" height="335"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyNBmi0SziM[/youtube]

DMMM is built on Valve’s Source engine, and it shows. Nice water, smooth character models, and plenty of physics as well as slightly sparse environments are all characteristics of the game’s core. The graphics might not win any awards, but in the same way they are not going to detract from the game. The choice of Source may have limited the game graphically, but it makes up for it by utilizing the other elements of the engine very successfully.

The physics plays an active role in the game throughout as you are expected to not just use your own arsenal of weaponry and spells to fight your enemies, but also the environment around you. In the demo you can use wall spikes, hanging boulders, and holes in the wall (which mysteriously launch jets of flames when a lever is pulled) to help defeat your foes.

DMMM also has a multiplayer option and the demo actually allows you to use it. Dropping you into one of several game types and maps, you once again get to pick a class and customize your character accordingly. For a while I felt like I was playing a cross between World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: Source, but once I got the hang of things, I died a little bit less. I can see this aspect of the game being big for some gamers, but for me I just didn’t find the game intuitive or fun enough to pull me away from all the other multiplayer offerings out there.

Overall the game looks promising and very much like a game I could enjoy, but there were a few small problems, like the fact that there’s no way to invert the Y-axis. This may not be the case in the full game or in fact a problem for some gamers, but in a world where every other game out there gives you this option, why is it missing? Also, I had a nasty habit of losing items I was trying to pick up. In order to pick up an item you must walk up to it then click A. If the item was on the the floor, I kept walking to far forwards, standing on the item and then watching it fly off into the distance.

The demo is currently out on Xbox Live and I would recommend downloading it. It’s a fun, free 20 to 30 minutes of what seems to be a relatively good game, and it comes with a moderate multiplayer option.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements is set for release on January 10th, 2008 for the Xbox 360.