The hay bale is mightier than the sword

Yesterday, I began in earnest my play through of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Yes, I know this game is like three years old, but I just bought from one of GoGamer.com's 48 madness sales for about $6. For those of you not familiar with the game, it's built using Valve's source engine of Half Life 2 fame.

After reading around and asking a friend, I decided that I wanted to play through as a mostly melee class with a little bit of support magic. After some cutscenes and an intro chapter or two in which you don't really fight anything, I finally got to some real action in chapter 2.

My first impression: this game is hard.

Now, let's be clear: I'm no slouch when it comes to video games, and I'm quite good at shooters, but this game is rough. It had three difficulty levels, Normal, Hard, and Insane/Difficulty/Don't play here... I'm pretty sure I picked the middle one (which in all fairness is called Hard, so maybe it makes sense).

You start the second chapter being awoken by a servant who informs you of an attack. A lone guard comes up the stairs; he is wearing full armor and has a shield and sword. This first fight didn't seem to cause me too much grief, although I did take quite a bit of damage. From there, you go down the stairs and out the door... that's where the craziness began.

Here, it threw me against a archer and three more of those melee soldiers. I literally replayed this section over a dozen times. The enemies constantly block your attacks and manage to get in plenty of their own (each of which deal at least a 1/4 to a 1/3 of your total life). If you do manage to land blows, it can take 4-5 full power swings to kill something.

As I continued to play through this section and the next, it READILY became apparent that I failed at fighting. I even pulled out my bow (which was RIDICULOUSLY underpowered) and my one spell (fire arrow) which was similarly pathetic. In the tutorial, the game taught me how to kick enemies to knock them off guard, kick them into fires, etc. Also, that I could pick up stuff and throw it at them as well. As it turns out, these are not helper abilities, but REQUIRED abilities.

Example: in chapter 3 (4?) I "infiltrated" a warehouse and found myself fighting an archer and a swordsman I'd already maimed. Upon killing the swordsman, two more swordsmen would spawn and join the fight. At some point, an archer ran in from the roof on the other side of the square and started shooting. Cue another 10-20 attempts. I FINALLY passed this section by figuring out the spawn order of the guys (kill the archer THEN the limping swordsman) and decided to enter the warehouse.

At this point, I'm sort of fed up with the ridiculousness, so after running into the warehouse, I pickup a bale of hay and throw it at the first guy I see. I then proceed, for the next minute or so, to repeatedly throw this same bale of hay at EVERYONE that appeared. When the dust settled I was surrounded by 5+ swordsman/archers and was standing next to my apparently lead-filled hay bale. I had now learned to let the rocks/barrels/hay bales do the fighting for me.

As I proceeded through the rest of this section, up until I left on the ship for an island (and quite honestly there as well), I would repeat the same basic process:

1) Find guys
2) Run around with my shield up until I found something to throw at them
3) Throw it at them and knock them down
4) Stab them while they were down
5) Find more things and throw them
6) Repeat

At the end of this section (Chapter 4, I think), I had gotten a new sword, I had leveled up my abilities a bit, and I actually got to a point where I felt like I was doing real damage to these guards. Of course shortly after that I started fighting orcs... but I'll save that one for my next post.