Chubby Cherub in possession shocker (Messiah (PC))

Member Name: Del_Boy

Product:	Messiah (PC)
Date:	29/07/00 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent graphics and sound

Disadvantages: Not for children, Platform sections

As far as originality goes, this game virtually has the field to itself, bar a few titles from older systems where the premise was vaguely similar.

What makes this so original, well you possess people. You play a Cherub that has been sent down from up above by ?The big man himself? to eradicate wrong doers on Earth. You can possess any character in the game, of which there are over 40.

Once possessed you take over their abilities as well, which is an extremely nice touch and is used well for certain puzzles. You may be unable to open a certain door, whilst another character may be able to ? that means you have to possess them. The way to possess someone is by jumping on them from behind ? eek?. Where do you enter them! Scary indeed.

This game has moments that are extremely funny though more than a tad sadistic. At the beginning of the game for example two soldiers started shooting at me. So I possessed one of them, and used his weapon to shoot his friend. Then for the piece de resistance I proceeded to take the man I had possessed up to a very high ledge and made him jump off! Well I did warn you it was sadistic, I then jumped out of him and watched him crawl about with shattered legs.

THIS GAME IS NOT FOR CHILDREN

It?s a good game, unfortunately in some parts, it gets caught up in a tawdry platform game nightmare. Those bits should have been taken out of the game, as they do nothing to keep the frenetic pace going.

Graphics wise, this game still looks pretty good and does a decent job of scaling graphics performance to your machines specs. If you have a very high spec machine, then the graphics will try to scale up to a point. This game notably was one of the first released that took advantage of Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) which means that if you are the lucky owner of a graphics card from the GeForce range, this game will take advantage of it fully.

I believe this game should h
ave stayed in development for a little longer as the originally release for example wouldn?t even boot up on my machine. This was because you were supposed to insert CD 2 (which was for in game music) after you clicked start. Nowhere did this get mentioned, a patch was out almost immediately for this oversight.

This game does have some moments of sheer class, an example that I can think of at the present moment is:

You possess a prostitute, you can then transfer into someone elses body by going up to them, and if they are receptive to you (ie Male) then you can kiss them. This enables you to jump into the other persons body then.

All in all, if you like the idea of this game, and have a reasonably up to date computer then I advise you to purchase this game (cost should be around £9.99).
Kev

Summary: