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| [Aug 08, 2006, 12:09 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments |
The Dark Messiah of Might & Magic single-player demo is now available, offering
the promised sample of Arkane Studios' upcoming Source-engine first-person
action/RPG based on the M&M series. The demo offers a tutorial along with the
first level of the game, in exchange for a fairly startling 1415 MB download.
The demo co-premieres on
3D Gamers and
FilePlanet (registration required), and mirrors are now online on
Boomtown (registration required),
Computer Games,
FileShack, Gamer's Hell,
and Worthplaying.
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| 47. |
Re: is that all? |
Aug 8, 2006, 16:51 |
Sixis |
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Well, first off it does work fine with Win2k (phew!). There have been recent demos that disable Win2k compatibility for no reason other than Microsoft's greed. Unofficial support is fine with me 
My mini-review:
Good graphics, about on par with HL2:E1 (although character models and animations are not quite as good). Runs very smooth on my mid-range system in smaller rooms, starts to chop in larger areas, crawled during the final cinema leading to the cyclops. Felt like unoptimized code to me, which is fine for a game over 2 months from release.
Gameplay is a double-edged sword, the primary claim of this game is to make you feel like your character has a physical presence in the environment, and this succeeds. I've never felt more like I was controlling a human body instead of a view-port with a weapon attached. Bad side is, there is only a few enemies to test all your slicing/dicing/burning/freezing love on. Really really could have used about triple the content here. And this is even after playing it through 3 times! I also wonder a little about the level designers creativity, it tends to come in short bursts of small set-pieces (again, impressions from basically 3 rooms), but it didn't floor me the way some games have. Level design would be a big piece of this game working, I hope the standard is high.
Other stuff, load times are just as long as HL2's (ugh, Source needs real work on this), at the resolution I picked (1280x1024) the loading screen text just ended mid-sentence.
Don't know which is more fun, burning and then freezing orcs, impaling them on my sword and then kicking their body off the sword into their friends, or sneaking up behind them and sticking my dagger into their throats and then kicking them off ledges!
I'm going to wait for a full review before buying it to see if the actual game is long enough to make a $50 purchase reasonable, but certainly even if it's short (say, less than 10 hours) it's still worth a mid-level price (under $30).
On WoW - Sixis - 60 Paladin of Azure Brigade (Garona) |
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