Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements

For everything that's good about the combat intensity, the flexibility of the skill system, the quality of the puzzles and the brooding, engaging atmosphere, it's undone by massive technical problems. After such a long wait, the last thing we expected was for it to be even more of a buggy, unoptimised mess than it was the first time around. But it is.

If you can put up with the game’s complete and total linearity and don’t mind a largely forgettable multiplayer offering, there is a ton of brutal amusement to be had with Dark Messiah’s excellent melee combat. The luster of physics-based gameplay may have worn off a bit over the last year and a half, but setting evildoers on fire is never boring.

Nearly two years after its buggy debut on the PC, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic comes to the Xbox 360 with even more problems.

"In the end, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Elements is an interesting experiment in genre-bending. Unfortunately, the process wasn't handled with enough care for the result to be anything more than an interesting interlude in between sessions of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. "