Wednesday 12 July 2006
You should have already seen just how exciting Dark Messiah of Might & Ma💜gic's action-packed 🔴combat is - just check out some of the footage on our movies tab - but now we've finally had a chance to thrash about in one of the game's single-player levels. And we're pleased to tell you that the orc-bashing feels fantastic.

Dark Messiah has a pleasing grittiness to♉ skirmishes that highlights t💞he game's differences to fellow first-person fantasy game, Oblivion. This is a brutally physical experience, where your primary concern is bashing the daylights out of your ugly-faced enemies, and it's a more focused adventure than Oblivion's monolithic rambling.

You've an incredible number of options for violence at your armoured fingertips. One-on-one fights can be exhausting, or clinically quick, depending on how you use you🐬r varied arsenal of weapons, spells and the environment that surrounds you. And scraps with gangs of opponents regularly feel like scenes from a ⭕Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbuster.

Above: Enemies will hurl you around if you don't protect yourself

Take our experiences for example. Alerting a band of cleaver-wie♏lding orcs, we climb to a higher platform and attack with our bow. But these meat-heads aren't totally brainless, jinking left and right to dodge our arrows. While we're distracted, one of the four orcs has found a nearby ledge and leaps across to our platform,𒁏 crashing his blade down as he lands.

Fortunately there's a neat kick attack that boots anything and anyone at close range. So, as the orc charg🙈es we let loose with a hefty punt and send him sprawling backwards on to a wooden platform - which is where your terrific interaction with the environment comes in. We slash out and cut a rope nearby, releasing a weighty lantern that crashes into the platform and demolishes it. Bye, bye Mr orc.