Your guardian angel (Messiah (PC))

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Product:	Messiah (PC)
Date:	15/07/00 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great graphics, clever concepts, clever AI

Disadvantages: The game is basically a platform jumper, a bit buggy

When a game undergoes a lengthy development period plagued by delays, a certain frustration
sets in. Once the final game is released, how are you supposed to go about forming an opinion
without remembering the hype and anticipation? For years (yes, literally years) the game
Messiah has been "just a few scant months away." As snippets of information were released and
preview after preview written, it became easy to give up hope altogether and find other upcoming
games to salivate over. Finally, Messiah has been released, and although the end result may not
live up to the years of hype, the finished product is an OK game--but not a great one.

Messiah puts you in the role of Bob, a cute little angel tasked with saving all of existence. Satan
has been imprisoned, and the Fathers (humans) are in danger of somehow using God's own laws
against Him, elevating themselves into His place. As Bob, you have to foil these evil plans.
Problem is, you're basically a 98-pound weakling in angelic form. You can fly, but you can't stand
up to a shotgun blast, your spiritual nature notwithstanding.

That's where the game's clever hook comes into play. As Bob, you can possess any organic
creature you see, and suddenly you're imbued with all of its abilities. Although we've seen this
recently in Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Messiah pushes the concept further. You'll often not only
have to possess a certain type of person to get through an area (a cop, for example, might have
access to a restricted area you need to get to), but you'll also have to disable the body you're
currently inhabiting before leaving it.

Gameplay spans both a futuristic Earth and the moon, and, as you might expect, the future isn't
all that nice a place to be (although nuns serving booze and wearing garter belts might get m
e to
darken the doorway of my local church). Unfortunately, Messiah devolves into a common "figure
out the puzzles and find the exit" type of level all too often, and there are too many jumping
sequences. In other words, the clever game concept is counterbalanced by the too-often
pedestrian style of gameplay that we've seen in so many other games. Some levels are quite
difficult, as well--as Bob, you're ridiculously easy to kill. And once you get past the more
frustrating moments, you will find that you're done with the game. Messiah, for all of its
development time, is a relatively short game.

There are moments of brilliance in Messiah. For instance, most of the puzzles have multiple
solutions; to get through a door you might be able to possess an officer who has access to the
area or someone else who has access to explosives (insert evil laugh here). The AI offers quite a
challenge, with enemies that use cover, circle around you, and pick up weapons. Be cautious
with the guards in most areas, though, because the game seems to cheat a bit; guards seem to
be able to target you instantly when they spot you. Then again, no one said saving humanity
would be simple.

The graphics are also quite good. The gritty, futuristic look and feel of the levels will make you
want to stop and look around, although it never feels like you are in a city as much as a series of
connected corridors. Still, the architecture of the levels is believable and detailed. The audio,
which features music by the hard-rock band Fear Factory, is also good. Although the music
blares during appropriate moments, you can clearly hear conversations during the game and you'll
probably be amused by the profanity-laced tirades of your enemies.

Although Messiah was generally stable on my AMD K2-350 and Voodoo3, I did not
ice some
frame-rate stuttering at times, and I experienced a few have-you-seen-your-desktop-lately
crashes. The game has earned a reputation for being buggy, and Interplay has issued a patch
that fixes many problems.

All said, Messiah will hold your interest long enough for you to finish the game, even though at
times it plays too much like a platform game. A solid concept, good graphics, and interesting
gameplay will get you about 75 percent of the way towards a perfect game, and, unfortunately,
that is where Messiah stops. Although the game could have perhaps benefited from (dare I say
it?) more development time, the end result is a good game that has intermittent shades of
greatness, but which never fully delivers.

Summary: