Downloaded it from Fragbite, a Swedish gaming site and tried the demo out.
Looks pretty interesting and still a bit rough around the edges and ALOT of MB's for quite little play but ayway here are some thoughts:
The game starts with a training session and the engine is Halflife 2/Counterstrike i.e running and walking feels like it is troiublesome for your poor hero. The graphics are quite nice and the settings will allow you to tweak and decrease effetcts to suit your computer pretty well.
The game lets you optimize your character in singleplayer and you can choose from fgihting progression; melee skills and bow skills/ arcane skills; magic spells, healing enhancements etc and finally misc skills like moving quicker, higher stamina etc.
Once through the press ctrl to jump, don't jump into fires and don't eat broken glass tutorials first stage (sarcasm)you get to wield a sword and chop suey some undeads and later som mercenaries. Fun and easy to control but as always with 1st person views and action, I prefer to be able to switch to 3rd person for close enconters and 1st for ranged combat. The combat isn't exactly smooth but once you earn some skill points it gets better.
After the tutorial you try your luck with the first part of the game, a sort of mining mountainside thingie.. A goblin kicked into oblivion (thats the favorite part, you can kick as in return to castle wolfenstein so when enemies become bothersome move them into position and kick them over an edge and no more problems
) I do the carnival ride and try my hands to do some medieval style glide-by-bow-and-arrow-shooting on an orc. Failing miserably cause shooting an arrow is really messy so once up I tried to fling my measly firespell and the orc laughed.. so I chopped him and kicked him over the edge. (Did I mention that I like to kick people and monsters?).
After a hectic fighting bar brawl with some more orcs in a room I find out the the game lets you solve many fights with different tactics. In this room for instance, there were several barrels and roopes holding heavy weighed kick ass trap like things (really art-noveau I would say
) that you expect to find in any suicidal orcs lving room. So when I am just to get the grip on fighting and blocking I get down a tunnel and face a really *insert famous Arnold Schwarzenegger line here* and the game treats me to a pre-order screen etc.
I must say that I had hoped for more considering the fun I had with the Prey demo. A well, I will definately keep a sharp eye out for this game. I haven't had this much fun since I finally got a hang on the controls for Severance (which was just a mess with the controls and made the game neigh unplayable). Miniguns, rockets and silenced guns are just toys when you can get down and dirty with a rusty cleaver and Dark Messiah seems to have plenty more of that in store. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Also, only the multiplayer aspects sounds worh to get this game for!