Despite its name, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic has very little in common with previous Might and Magic games, other than the fact that it is (apparently) set in the same universe.

Rather than continuing the franchise’s traditional role-playing approach, developer Arkane and publisher Ubisoft have opted for a much more action-oriented take on proceedings. But before all you Oblivion fans out there get too excited, Dark Messiah is much more akin to the average first-person shooter than it is to Bethesda’s action RPG epic.

For a start, Dark Messiah’s single-player story features no custom character creation element. It’s possible to level up your character a little as you progress, but you begin the game the same as every other player; in the shoes of Sareth, promising student of dodgy-looking mage Phenrig.

Also, rather than allowing you to independently scour the land looking for adventure, Dark Messiah forces you down a fairly linear path. There are some diverging storylines and different endings, but don’t expect too many opportunities to exercise your free will.

There are plenty of dungeons to explore and oodles of items to uncover, but Dark Messiah’s emphasis is firmly on the hacking, slashing and spell zapping side of things.

Based on an enhanced version of the Half-Life 2 engine, the game boasts ‘realistic’ physics, which basically translates into alternative methods of offing your enemies – kick them off cliffs, kick them onto spikes, kick them into fires, kick stuff at them and so on.

Yes, there’s quite a lot of kicking involved. At first this is mildly amusing, but the fun wears off reasonably quickly and the limits of the developers’ imagination soon become apparent.

The main problem with Dark Messiah is that it’s heavily bogged down by technical issues – and we don’t mean the occasional missing texture or camera quirk. We tried the game on two different systems, both of which far exceeded the game’s relatively demanding system recommendations and, in both cases, experienced repeated crashes and lock ups.

On one system the game suffered from such severe jerkiness that it was rendered completely unplayable. In the end, we turned off just about all the advanced graphical effects (ignoring the suggested higher settings), at which point, the game played okay, but looked dreadful.

It’s not just us, either. Pay a visit to any relevant forum and, while a significant number of people seem to have encountered very few or no issues at all, you’ll also find hundreds of disgruntled users complaining about freezes on loading screens (although loading times can last so long, it’s quite hard to tell), blank screens instead of full motion video (FMV) cut scenes and even random in-game glitches where items disappear or crash the game. At the time of writing, Ubisoft has yet to issue a patch.

It’s a shame, because somewhere within Dark Messiah of Might and Magic there’s a fairly decent game trying to get out. The multi-player portion, in particular, shows a lot of promise with novel takes on deathmatch, arena and capture the flag modes as well as an intriguing team objective-based Crusade mode.

Graphics and sound are pretty good too, assuming you get the game to run smoothly.

But, while a patch to fix some or all of the game’s technical troubles is almost certainly on its way, we still feel awkward recommending a product that might not work properly off the shelf.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the saying goes. But if it is broke, then please for heaven’s sake wait until it’s fixed before foisting it on the general public and ruining everybody’s fun.

UPDATE:
As we went to press, a patch of fixes and some technical recommendations were released by Ubisoft. It’s too early to tell whether these will address all of the game’s issues, although our initial experiences are encouraging.

Either way, the game should never have gone to retail in such a state. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the saying goes. But if it is broke, then please for heaven’s sake wait until it’s fixed before foisting it on the general public and ruining everybody’s fun.