Dark Messiah of Might and Magic review

The full lowdown can be foundhere, but we'll give you the basics. Players begin by choosing one of five character classes: Archer, Mage, Priestess, Knight, or Assassin (no multi-classes here like in the single-player game). Then, you head log onto the Steam network and enter 32-player medieval deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, Crusade, or Coliseum matches.

Crusade pits two teams against one another in a campaign made up of multiple battles for key control points on the map. When one team wins, it advances deeper into the opposing team's territory. The winner is the team that pushes through the map and takes over the opponent's castle. These matches can take a good chunk of time to complete, especially when two teams of roughly equal skill start seesawing back and forth over possession of a couple of areas.

Matches of Coliseum, the second atypical mode, hearken back to the days of the arcade, with players taking each other on in one-on-one combat while an audience of standby players cheers on the action from the cheap seats in the area. Okay, yeah: it's basically a fighting game, but that's pretty rare in the online PC space.