Friends and Fire Hands

I had a very productive game playing weekend; I finished my second play through of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and I completely finished Penumbra. I'll most likely be breaking my Penumbra experiences into the next 2 or 3 posts. But first, I'll recount the last half of Dark Messiah.

When I left off, I was just starting Chapter 7... which was largely uneventful. Lightning made pretty short work of all the goblins and orcs I came across. I even picked up the lightning shield (even though I couldn't wield it) because it made me feel more awesome for some reason.

The rest of the chapters required some new tactics. Starting in Chapter 8, you begin to face large quantities of Vampire Knights (I think that's what they are called). They are pretty much like the regular melee soldiers you've fought previously, except they are MUCH faster and undead. Being undead, they had no weaknesses; neither fire nor lightning do them much damage (I'm pretty sure I threw 5 or 6 fireballs at one once). Due to the difficulties I was having, I dropped some skill points into another new spell: Charm. Once I did, I wondered why it had taken me so long to pick it up.

My new strategy basically involved me running into a room of guys, charming the meanest looking one, then running around until I could cast charm again. Maybe it's just me, but I think there is something absolutely delightful about watching enemies kill each other. It seriously reminded me of playing Bioshock with a decoy.

When I played through Bioshock (both times), my general strategy was to:

1. Drop a decoy in the middle of a group of enemies
2. Watch them kill each other trying to hit the decoy
3. Hit the remaining enemy once with the crowbar (pipe?) Editor's note: It's a wrench.
   
4. Grin
   

My enemy charming strategy worked great all through Chapters 8 and 9.

In the Epilogue, I got a new spell: Inferno. Inferno is basically like having a flamethrower in place of your arm. It burns mana like crazy, but by that point in the game I had buffed my mana regen and had so many mana potions I couldn't pick up new ones. Inferno became my spell of choice. In short, it absolutely decimated everything I came across. My revised strategy:

1. Run into a group of enemies
2. Cast Sanctuary (shield spell)
3. Spin in a circle whilst spewing fire from my hand
4. Watch enemies burn and fall down while I laugh maniacally
   

I quickly finished the game and saw the two extra endings (I had chosen the "evil" path this time) without much fuss.

A short batch of final, Final Thoughts:

• I grossly underrated magic in my first play through. I feel like you'd have to put quite a few points into it to make it worthwhile (buff your mana pool and your mana regen, etc), but it's definitely more impressive than I gave it credit for. Even as a melee character, I think you could just pick up stuff in the defensive tree (Heal and Sanctuary) and receive a big help.
  
• Until you get a really great shield, staves are the way to go. Even though they do less damage, their group attack abilities are amazing. Being able to stun enemies is ridiculously helpful when you are fighting more than one.
• The game is balanced a lot more intelligently at normal. After playing through in Hard and Normal, it's pretty obvious they balanced the game for Normal and then just sort of jiggled the numbers around for the other two difficulties. Do yourself a favor: just play it on Normal.
• None of the decisions you make really have any sort of impact on the game at all. The endings are all remarkably similar and lack any real reason to play the game through again. If you are playing for the first time, just play the "good" way so you can used the blessed weapons.

That concludes my time in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic... I promise. Next up will be the second episode and expansion to Penumbra.