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I found it in the discount bin a while back and I'm finally playing it.
It's really cool and I've had few problems, despite all the negative reviews.
Maybe the patch fixed it.

Anyways, it has some really awesome combat.
You get to do melee, stealth, or magic, which sounds pretty standard but gets really interesting.
Note that you don't have a class, so you can do anything whenever, it's just that you won't have enough skill points to do everything at once.
As a melee character, you fight with swords or staves. The stealth way uses daggers, while the mage does whatever and has spells.

Anyways back to the fighting... awesomely cool. You get to do several varieties of attacks, based on your direction keys. As you fight, your adrenaline builds up then charges letting you do fatalities like decapitation or a nice impale where you kick them off your sword with your foot. You can also kick at any time! In case you didn't know, it uses the Source engine so good physics! Sword fighting takes a long time because they have a lot of health, but you can always kick them off a ledge, kick them into fire, knock them down the stairs, throw a barrel at them... it keeps going. You really use the environment a lot, and it works very well once you get used to it. You also get a telekinesis spell to toss things, and when you're under the adrenaline charge, you can throw people at each other.
There's a lot of things set up to abuse, like weak pillars or statues or knock over onto people, campfires, jars of oil to set on fire, spike walls, and traps.

Your spells are pretty interesting too. You have a freeze spell to soldify enemies for a bit, or you can ice the floor and watch them slip into death traps.

The skill system has 3 trees with a handful (~6) skills each, with some of them having upgrade levels. You get skills from doing objectives like in Deus Ex.

I think the biggest problem is bugs, but I haven't really seen any except from mis-timed voice acting. It also doesn't run great, but I can't crank HL2 either.
I just got to the spot where the game used to have a game-stopping bug, so I'll tell you if it's fixed ninja

Edit:
Finished the game off, and no serious bugs... except one time my auto-save made me stuck in a wall. That's due to the "rope bow" you get, which you lets you make a climbable rope all over the place. It messes up clipping sometimes, though I never got stuck except that autosave.

The ending was sort of disappointing, but eh, I still liked the game quite a bit. Well worth it, especially if it's in the discount bin!!

I wanted to bump this thread because Dark Messiah is currently $5 on Steam.

It's a really good game. Very fun combat throughout.

It's really the only game I've played where you actively use the environment in combat throughout the game.
I really want to replay it now >_>

Well the classes are still there but I don't remember those chest problem... I only played through it once though.
I don't remember any of the weapon details. I just remember it was challenging combat where you get to kick people onto spikes ninja