General Tips

Know Your Foe

Various weapons are listed as doing more damage to enemies that are vulnerable to fire or lightning. If you don’t pay attention to the loading screens, you may not know this, but, for the sake of being thorough, we’ll spell it out for you.

Weak to Fire: Humans and spiders. Set them alight!
Weak to Lightning: Orcs, Goblins, and Cyclopses. Cyclopi. Cyclopses. Whatever.

Knowing what kind of magical attacks your foes are weak against will help you take advantage of their vulnerabilities.

It’s unclear if undead have any particular weaknesses; they appear not to. The most powerful weapons in the game deal double damage to the undead, though, so you likely won’t have to worry about it.

Using Physics To Your Advantage

Dark Messiah is based on the Source engine, which hasn’t powered a large number of games thus far, but which is well known for one in particular: Half-Life 2. One of the things that game in particular was known for was its innovative use of physics, with such craziness as the Gravity Gun letting everyone fling around sawblades with abandon. Luckily, Dark Messiah incorporates much of the physics whackiness from Half-Life 2, but it does it in some new ways. Here are a few tips to putting the physics in Dark Messiah to work for you.

Kicking

It’s easy to dismiss the kick mechanism here as a gimmick, something to use once or twice and then never touch again. Well, there is a mechanism that fits that description, but you won’t get to it until chapter seven. Kicking, on the other hand, is massively useful, allowing you to kill powerful enemies in a single blow.

Basically speaking, if you kick an enemy from a height, they’re going to instantly die. There are many, many large heights in Dark Messiah. You can do the math. The trick here is that your enemy has to be a set distance away from the edge. If they’re too far away, you’ll only tap them back lightly, and lose stamina to boot. If they’re within the necessary range, though, they’ll be flung back violently to the their deaths. Fun! Getting the hang of this will take some time, and it’s sometimes difficult to get in range of a kick without getting hit by a weapon.

With a solid kick or two, you can polish off your enemies without breaking a sweat. Unless you, you know, sweat because you kick.

Kicking can also be used in the same manner to knock your opponent into an environmental hazard. There are two main examples of these: spikes and fires. Spikes can be found lining many of the game’s corridors and walls, for some odd reason; if you stand with an enemy between you and one of these spike traps and give them a good swift kick, they’ll go flying into the spikes and immediately die. Fire is another version of this, with the added bonus of usually being in the middle of a room, giving you more leeway about rotating around to get a good kick angle. Lastly, if you kick an enemy into deep water, they’ll die right away; none of your enemies can swim.

Note that every character, from the beefiest warrior to the wimpiest spellcaster, is equally proficient at kicking. Characters that pay the skill point for Stamina can kick a couple more times before wearing out (and it’s a great skill for that very reason), however.

Throwing

There’s plenty of detritus scattered around the world of Dark Messiah. Most of it can be picked up and thrown as makeshift weapons! Things like barrels, boxes, candlesticks, chairs, frogs, shovels, small children, barnyard animals...well, some of those, anyway.

Picking up something is as simple as walking over to it and using it. Throwing it simply requires you to hold down your attack button and release it! The heavier the object you pick up, the more damage you’ll do to your opponent, with things like stones and barrels generally being one-hit kills in most instances. This is a bit more complicated than kicking people around, though, as it’s difficult to run away from someone, pick something up, and chuck it at them before they close into melee range with you.