Messiah is a fun game. It's not a particularly long game, or a particularly deep game, and I felt that I was playing a macabre mix of
Mario 64, and a poorly-controlled
Time Crisis at times, but the game never takes itself seriously enough for you to really get mad at it. It just never shines particularly well. After the first few scenes demonstrate what games can really be like, it just never goes farther. Jumping puzzles abound.
You play the part of Bob, an angel sent down from Heaven to fix the world. You can't do much of anything in your 'natural' form, except point your finger and say 'bang' in a cute little kid's voice, so your first order of business is to possess someone. Depending on the difficulty level you select at the beginning of the game, possessing people can be a joke or absolutely impossible. You decide. After you've possessed someone, you've got to make sure that you act like that person should -- a scientist running around with a machine gun is typically killed on sight, whereas a police officer with a gun is acceptable. There is also a war going on between the cops and the chots, so if you're in one or the other's skinsuit and you run into your antagonist, prepare for a fight.
The puzzles in the game often consist of figuring out how to get someone of a particular type (scientist, commander, whatever) to a particular place in order to get somewhere new. On occasion, the puzzles are a little more interesting, such as the Soylent Green-esque puzzle near the beginning of the game, but most of it is spent finding the right 'tool' for the job at hand. After you've done a few of those, you get to progress to a jumping puzzle of some sort, dodging evil steam or whatever the game designers decided to throw at you. It's entertaining for a while, and it never really gets dull, but it doesn't get too exciting either. You're given suggestions on where to go and how to do things by a mysterious voice inside your head (and if you don't see where that one's going from the beginning, you need to check your logic skills).
When you get into a gunfight, prepare to get pissed. The game's shooting controls are great for isolated characters, but when you've got to deal with more than one enemy at the same time, it's mainly a pain in the ass. The enemy AI is very good, dodging behind crates and running across openings while shooting, which only makes it worse. I found that basically killing one guy, losing my host body, jumping into a new one, and killing more seemed to work best. It's not the tidiest method of doing it, but it's the only way that didn't require me to reload more than ten times a battle.
