Dark messia game

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Discover the fresh perspective of a view with complete body awareness, realistic movements, physics rendering, and a complete first-person melee combat system in a fantasy setting. Never-ending action: Challenge the forces of evil in 12 huge levels and learn to master over 30 weapons and an arsenal of devastating spells.

Evolve your character: Extend your gameplay experience without being limited to a single discipline. Learn powerful new spells and attacks using Dark Messiah's unique Skill Evolution System as you progress through the game. Revolutionary multiplayer mode: Get ready to battle with up to 32 players in the revolutionary Crusade mode, which will enable players to gain experience and new skills across dynamic online campaigns.

Enlist with the humans or the undead and choose among five complementary character classes. All Rights Reserved. Along the path of delivering the crystal, watching it get stolen, tracking it down, delivering it elsewhere, tracking down another mystical artifact, etc. Although a few games have attempted to incorporate melee combat from a first-person perspective, few have done so as viscerally as Dark Messiah does, mostly through its complete control of your camera perspective.

That said, though, the action is simply fun, what with all the kicking people off of cliffs, into fires, into water, into spikes, into spikes that are on fire, etc. Various weapons are listed as doing more damage to enemies that are vulnerable to fire or lightning. Weak t o Fire: Humans and spiders. Set them alight! Weak to Lightning : Orcs, Goblins, and Cyclopses. Knowing what kind of magical attacks your foes are weak against will help you take advantage of their vulnerabilities.

One of the things that game in particular was known for was its innovative use of physics, with such craziness as the Gravity Gun letting everyone fling around sawblades with abandon. Luckily, Dark Messiah incorporates much of the physics whackiness from Half-Life 2, but it does it in some new ways.

Here are a few tips to putting the physics in Dark Messiah to work for you. Kicking, on the other hand, is massively useful, allowing you to kill powerful enemies in a single blow. There are many, many large heights in Dark Messiah. You can do the math. The trick here is that your enemy has to be a set distance away from the edge. With a solid kick or two, you can polish off your enemies without breaking a sweat.

Unless you, you know, sweat because you kick. Kicking can also be used in the same manner to knock your opponent into an environmental hazard. There are two main examples of these: spikes and fires. Fire is another version of this, with the added bonus of usually being in the middle of a room, giving you more leeway about rotating around to get a good kick angle. Note that every character, from the beefiest warrior to the wimpiest spellcaster, is equally proficient at kicking.

Most of it can be picked up and thrown as makeshift weapons! Things like barrels, boxes, candlesticks, chairs, frogs, shovels, small children, barnyard animals Picking up something is as simple as walking over to it and using it. Throwing it simply requires you to hold down your attack button and release it! Skills are going to be the way in which you define your character as you play Dark Messiah. This chapter will be dedicated to the various character archetypes and descriptions of the key skills for each.

Most melee enemies will have their parries up, making these strikes useless, but if you get close to an archer you can quickly wear them down with these. Level one also unlocks Charge, a handy attack that can be used by combining your sprint key and any power attack. Level Two : At level two, you unlock Disarming. When an enemy is stunned, either by Charge or from getting kicked around too much, you can target them with any power strike to fling their weapons out of their hands.

In practice, this is sometimes more annoying than useful, since you deal no damage on a disarm, and sometimes all you really want to do with your enemy is finish them off.

That said, a disarmed enemy is pretty harmless, but they will track down any nearby weapons and use those after picking them up. Also note that disarming will allow you to automatically disarm any opponent when you win a locked-blades contest with them. More importantly, perhaps, is the ability to use shields. Shields will block more attacks than simply parrying will, such as arrows flung your direction, but they will degrade over time as they get beat on.

Level Three : At level three, your Flurry of Blows will sometimes be capable of breaking enemy parries. Still, every little bit helps. Not extremely useful, in our experience, but it looks neat. You do need a supply of arrows to work with a bow, but there are enough of those around to let you never run dry.

Leve Two : Steadies the aim of the bow, completely eliminating what in another context would be called scope drift. This is more or less required before you can start hitting difficult shots, such as for using the bow to cut ropes at long distance. Again, the dip of the arrow will still make it difficult to accurately place them until you practice with them a fair amount. Level Three : Decreases the amount of time required to reload an arrow after firing. Although expensive, Adrenaline will be worthwhile for any advanced warrior, as it will allow you to recharge your adrenaline more quickly and perform two killing attacks when you have full adrenaline.

Dark Vision is basically an amped-up gamma shift. Use it often. Flame Arrow is basically the magical equivalent of a pea-shooter in Dark Messiah. Fire trap is a tricky spell to use properly. The trick is to get the enemies to walk over the fire trap. Most enemies will die after impacting it, although creatures with demon blood, like orcs, will be more resistant to the fire effects.

Freeze is an interesting spell with some not-so-obvious uses. When cast on an enemy, it will cover them with ice, temporarily preventing them from blocking or attacking or moving at all, giving you plenty of time to queue up a power attack or kick them off a cliff or something. Freeze is fun, but not dramatically powerful. When cast on the ground, however, Freeze will create a slick spot of ice where you aimed it, causing any enemies that walk over it to fall to the ground.

This is obviously a hilarious way to make your foes go through a number of pratfalls, but as with Fire Trap, it can be more amusing than useful at times.

Adrenaline Effect : Freeze will permanently freeze your target when cast when you have a full Adrenaline meter, essentially killing them. Fireball, when unlocked, will be a powerful offensive spell against humans and animals, who are weak to fire.

Thus, it can sometimes be useful as a quasi-rocket launcher; just aim it at the ground next to an enemy to make them fly away and over the edge of a cliff, for instance. Best of all, fireballs are cheap, cheap enough to let you cast an almost continuous stream of them after you get Mana Regeneration. Orcs, goblins, and cyclops are all considered to have demon blood, which is odd, considering the orcs accost you halfway through the game and lament your "demon taint".

Which in another context would be a hilarious accusation. All of them are supposedly weak to lightning bolts, and indeed, you can usually instantly kill goblins by casting this at them. Stick to weapons or fireballs for Orcs, in other words. Adrenaline : Lighting Bolts on adrenaline cause chain lightning, meaning the bolt jumps from target to target in a given area. Great for clearing out low-level enemies. You can hold the button down as long as you like to keep the stream flowing. Unfortunately there are some problems here, including the cost.

Just activating the spell costs 20 mana; keeping the button depressed will cause you to rapidly lose more mana to boot. Also, when cast against enemies that are closing to melee range, the spell will begin to damage you, as well, since it has nowhere to go.

This, combined with its short range, make Inferno rather inflexible and expensive compared to its effect. That effectively means that even the most non-magical warrior can convert a mana potion into 30 health after casting two heals on himself. Telekinesis is expensive enough, mana-wise, to only be useable by serious mages as an offensive skill.

As a weapon, Telekinesis is best used when cast on unbreakable items, like stones and bales of hay, that can then be targeted at your enemies and sent flying at them. Press the cast button again to fling the object away from you at warp speed.

Stones are usually the best, when you start finding them, usually in chapter Nine and the Epilogue. Keep in mind, though, that you can also cast Telekinesis on enemy corpses and throw those. Adrenaline Effect : You can pick up and throw living enemies while your Adrenaline is full. Charm will greatly help weaker spellcasters when dealing with mobs of enemies.

For fifteen mana, this spell will enable you to temporarily take over the mind of one of the enemies in the area, forcing them to fight on your side for around 30 seconds, or until they die. If you stumble across a single enemy, you can use charm to simply brainwash him and run past him before the spell runs out, or get him into position for a kick off a cliff. With multiple enemies, charm will cause them to attack each other, thus also letting you either run past them, or watch them eliminate each other and make your life easier when the spell runs out.

Keep in mind that charm will end if you damage the charmed opponent, so be careful when firing arrows or spells into a melee involving one of your slaves. Your standard god mode, sanctuary will render you temporarily immune to damage when cast.

You can even cast it while falling to eliminate all of the falling damage that you might take. Considering how deep it comes in the skill tree, we were hoping for a bit more from Weaken. When cast on an enemy, it will essentially just temporarily cripple them, temporarily turning them purple, reducing their speed drastically and reducing the damage that they deal to 1 point per attack.

It's less dramatic an effect than most of the magical spells that you can cast, but it has the benefit of being castable on multiple foes when dealing with large crowds, giving you a better chance of outrunning your opponents. For one lowly skill point, Stamina will allow you to use more stamina-based skills before having to rest.

That means more sprinting, more swimming, and most importantly more kicking before you run out of juice. Since almost everyone will be kicking enemies over cliffs in every part of the game, this is a must-have skill for most every character.

The three levels of Endurance are expensive, but worthwhile for warriors, or anyone who can afford them. Nothing especially mystifying here; the more you spend, the more your maximum health will rise. Endurance also effects the kinds of armors that warriors can wear. Luckily, Antidotes can be found in numerous places throughout the game, especially when you need them most in the catacombs under the Temple of the Spider, look for the green vases and smash them.

If you want large amounts of mana, you'll have to invest in Magic Affinity. Vitality will increase the health regeneration rate of your character. That said, though, the warrior Souldrinker sword is going to be more effective at regaining you health than the Soulreaver Staff will be for regaining mana for mages.

As a prerequisite, though, mages and rogues will have to have it. A basic skill, Magic Affinity will greatly increase your base maximum mana, eventually increasing it to five times your starting allotment. Stealth is a fairly cheap investment, allowing any character to be a master backstabber for just six skill points. That said, most stealth characters will also have enough points in combat skills to deal with their enemies in a more traditional way, if need be.

Allows you to pick the locks on doors and chests. Your master, Phenrig, is finally ready to put you into the field, giving you an assignment to track down and retrieve a mystic artifact from within a large temple.

If you played the Dark Messiah demo, you should be familiar with this level. He's not getting up after this. Anyway, this level is, for the most part, a simple tutorial on how to interact with the environment in Dark Messiah, as well as how to defend yourself against hostile foes. Begin by running down the hallway in front of you and grabbing the spider medallion from the altar there. It can be placed in the doorway nearby to unlock it.

With that done, pass through the door, flip the switch, then use your sprint key to quickly move past the portcullis before it falls again. Next up is a weak spot tutorial; kick the pillar and climb the chain upwards to move on.

Pick up and move the boxes that are highlighted, then kick through the boards to move on. At this point, Phenrig tells you to activate your Dark Vision spell.

This is a free no mana cost ability that can be used to pierce the veil of darkness around you, allowing you to see at night and in gloomy surroundings. It helps if you bind it to its own key, while still retaining the lower-number keys for more vital weapons and spells. To do so, shuffle it over to the 9 slot on your hotbar, then go into your key bindings and change the "Belt Shortcut 9" command to something closer to your left hand, like the "f" button.

This will let you quickly toggle Dark Vision on and off, without having to reach all the way over and hit the 9 button. God, Phenrig has an insufferable voice! Up next are some combat tests, starting with zombies. Feel free to toy with them as much as you like, though.

Allot it now, if you wish, then climb the rope past the portcullis to end the mission. Unfortunately, as you arrive at the gates, the necromancer army also arrives, with a zombie Cyclops. Try to ignore the low-rent seductress voice in your head.

Insert frowning face here. When you get your bearings and manage to get back on your feet, start running away from the Cyclops. Just keep moving onward and upward until you reach another rope to jump to. Jump to it, then immediately jump from there across to the platform that the soldier is standing on.

At this point, ghouls may get up the stairs and attack. You can block them from doing so by running over to the gate control switch and dropping it; if any ghouls get through, grab the boxes nearby and use those to throw at them. Just be sure not to hit any of the soldiers!

Nothing too complicated here; just point it at the Cyclops and hit it three times to weaken it enough for the soldiers to kill it. Tip: See the bread on the benches near the ballista? These, along with all other food items, become "Food Rations" when picked up, and will restore two health when eaten from the inventory.

Grab all the weapons you find, which should include a short sword, bow, daggers, and a staff. No need to pick a favorite just yet, although the short sword will probably be best for cracking open the chests and crates in town. If you look up, you should see a blue glow above you. Getting it will require you to have Telekinesis, apparently, but if you do you can simply wand it down from its airy heights. There's a secret area up this ladder. Check the area for a ladder, climb it up, then push open the windows to reveal a hidden attic.

Break the chest for a Full Health potion. After poking around thoroughly there are some private residences with goodies inside, but the guards will be upset if they spot you entering them , talk to Leanna to end the chapter. Ooh, sounds mysterious! These suckers will never know what hit them. You can be as sneaky or as overt as you like. If you want to weaken them up significantly, exit the house, sneak along to the right, and twist the lever on the small crane there to move a large crate over into the two soldiers that are standing by the fire.

Open the door with the chain attached to it and head down to reach the next part of the chapter. After heading downstairs from outside, open the door across the way. However, if you dig out the barrels behind the large cask of wine either by destroying them or by throwing them out of the way, you can find a Ring of the Weaponmaster. Pretty handy at the moment, since even spellcasters will still be using weapons for most of their kills. The Alertness skill will let you spot secret switches and areas when you stand still.

Move down the hallway nearby to find another couple of soldiers chatting it up in a room. If you look around for a suspicious block sticking out of the ground in the far corner of the room, you can hit it to open up a path to a shut-off part of the cellar.

Move on from there up into the throne room of the castle. There are going to be a couple of guards here, with four or so more coming along as you kill the previous ones. When you first come out of the doorway, hang a left, walk up the steps, and cut the rope on the pillar.

This will cause the chandelier at the top of the room to swing down and hit any guards that get in its way. With your kick function, you can stand near the path it takes and make sure they get in its way. The Bow of the Disciple will be sitting by the throne itself, so be sure to grab that if you like arching stuff. Make your way up to the main library, but before heading in, take the stairs all the way up to find the Old Key on the ground.

When you reach the library, kill the guards, then flip the switch on one of the walls to bring down a rope. Climb up it, and keep an eye out on the ground below; a set of shelves here block off one corner of the room, and you can drop down to find another secret area.

Likewise, when you start heading back up the steps nearby, find the small panel on the wall in the shadowed area of the floor to find yet another secret area in the rafters of the throne room. Nearby is the transition to the last part of the chapter. On the rooftops, kill the guard near where you start the level, then jump down to the roof area and start making your way to the next building.

Way to go, Mr. Bigshot Wizard! The beginning of this level will pick up the chase of the ghoul. No time to waste! Begin by heading out to the rooftops, taking a right, then entering the window there. The ghoul will pass in front of you. Even if you catch up to the Ghoul, you won't be able to stop it from its appointed rounds.

Follow the ghoul through the nearby building. Smash the planks that block your way, then walk out onto the rooftops and rotate around to the stone path nearby. Some of the gaps that are too far to cross normally will be crossable that way. Before you hit the loading screen, nab the Staff of the Disciple. There are two ways to get into the building here after hitting the ground. If you go to the left, you can kill a few of the guards outside, take their key, and enter through the door.

Up to you. If you do head to the left and take on the guards, though, be sure to run up the ladder along the left wall where one of the archers is located.

If you want, you can make a Long Sword for yourself by using the tools in the manner described in the book by the smithy. There are all of two recipes for smithing in the game, at least that we've found.

Let's just say that it's an underdeveloped mechanic. Notice the boarded-up passageway in the smithy. This is the alternate route to where Arantir is using the Crystal. The primary passage is back in the room before the smithy.

The alternate route has some goodies, like the Ring of Arcane Brilliance , which adds 10 mana to your total, but the primary route has two doors near its start which has the upgrades for fighters. When you find him, quietly sneak over to one of the cells and unlock the cells with the switch on the wall. If you do, you automatically lose. When you come to a locked gate, turn to the right and follow the water to the end of the level. Kicking the soldiers into the water will instantly kill them.

Ah, the Sea of Blood. We always wanted to go there for vacation. Head out to the docks and kick the soldier in front of you into the water. In a dream, he recalls his meeting with Phenrig, except that Phenrig appears to be holding Sareth by a leash.

He also sees Xana again, but as she transfers her consciousness into his mind, she appears to be a demon. Sareth and Leanna leave Stonehelm by boat and travel to the island with the Skull of Shadows. While en route, Sareth has another dream in which he kills Leanna, and Arantir alludes that she is only the first of many victims.

After arriving, they find the expedition destroyed, and most of the men dead, killed by orc warriors. Sareth and Leanna are chased into the Temple of the Skull by a Pao kai which Sareth kills a little later with a gate, and Sareth proceeds alone to the top of the Temple, where he places the Shantiri Crystal, and defeats the Orc chief Aratrok in a duel.

Arantir then reveals himself and appears to kill Leanna. Sareth, however, escapes to the crypt below and retrieves the Skull of Shadows. Sareth then has a vision of the Demon Sovereign Kha Beleth , who reveals himself to be Sareth's father. Kha Beleth names Sareth the Dark Messiah, and then commands to be released using the power of the Skull.

Sareth wakes up to see Arantir, who takes the skull and then impales Sareth on a spike. Fueled by Xana's demonic power, Sareth wakes up alive and gains the power to transform into a demon, which grants him uncanny strength at the cost of health. Stripped of all his belongings, Sareth uses the demon form to fight off the Orc guards as he recovers his items.

He manages to leave the island and returns to Stonehelm. Once there, he takes the portal to Nar-Heresh. There, Sareth witnesses Leanna — who is still alive — being thrown into a spider pit. Saving Leanna is optional, but impacts the possible endings that the player may receive.

Regardless of the player's choice, Sareth discovers Arantir's plans to sacrifice the entire population of Stonehelm in order to permanently seal Kha Beleth's prison. Sareth then returns to a besieged Stonehelm, fighting alongside the remaining human resistance. If Leanna was rescued in the previous chapter, Sareth may visit the sanctuary in order to purge Xana from his body. If Sareth proceeds with the cleansing, he loses the ability to transform into a demon, but gains the ability to use powerful holy weapons.

If Sareth is unable or unwilling to undergo the cleansing ritual, nothing will change. Whatever the case, the choices determines which endings the player may receive. In the ancient necropolis over which Stonehelm was built, Sareth is eventually reunited with Leanna.

If the player left her behind in the spider pit, she appears as a Lich, who Sareth then destroys. If Sareth saved her, but did not cleanse himself, she will attack him. If Leanna was rescued and Sareth cleansed himself, she will join Sareth in the final chapter. Sareth then makes his way through the necropolis and eventually catches up with Arantir as he is about to perform the ritual.

Sareth kills Arantir, but Arantir revives himself and summons an undead Pao Kai. Sareth fights off the Pao Kai, which forces Arantir to perform a resummoning, during which Arantir is vulnerable. Eventually Arantir is defeated, leaving Sareth to make his final decision for the Skull.

The player may use the Skull to lock his father away forever, or destroy the Skull and free his father. Each option offers a different ending.