Good, Old Features in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was released on 24 October 2006 on PC, according to Wikipedia. I bought it on Steam recently and just played it through. It certainly looks old now, but it has some features some new games unfortunately do not.

The most important of these is that the player is allowed to freely use the basic functions Save Game (As) and Quick Save, as well Load Game and Quick Load. It is mind-boggling, why all games do not have these features.

The second most important feature the game has, is the option to use cheats or "developer's console" as the game calls it. This includes the excellent idea of Buddha mode, which only prevents the player character's death from normal damage (unlike god mode, which presumably makes him invulnerable to damage). This feature should be used in all games. Because of other (bad) features of the game, I used Buddha mode for almost the whole of the second half of the game.

The game also has a pretty nice experience system, in the form of skill points the player is awarded at various points, and can then use to increase skills. The cost to increase a skill, such as Strength, increases the higher it goes (typically up to level 3), and these skills are hierarchically connected so that one has to increase some skills to the maximum level in order to be able to gain new skills connected to them. This is otherwise a nice system, but the player is never warned that the game is short enough and the skill points / experience so rarely awarded that the player can never attain even close to all the skills. 

Alas, I cannot say the game is good. It's good enough to be played through once, but it is completely linear, like most games, I suppose. The only real options the player has, is how to use the aforementioned skill points. The paths is set so hard that there is hardly any difference even between the alternative endings. But at least there's some enjoyment, mostly made possible by the use of the features listed above, which is more than I can say about some more recent games.