If you visit the Dark Messiah official forum (and I certainly can't blame you if you chose to stay away from it lately), you will find very positive and very negative comments about the game. There are a series of problems with the current version of the game, to the extent that producer Romain de Waubert de Genlis and a member of the development team had to make statements in the forum. However, many people, including Celestial Heavens' Marzhin, enjoy the game and don't experience any problem. It seems that uninstalling the demo prior to installing the game might solve some issues. Lowering the visual settings, disabling HDR and performing a file integrity check in Steam can also solve your problems. If that doesn't help, know that patch 1.01 will be released soon.

Dark Messiah received praises from several Web sites: Eurogamer (8), Games Radar (9), IGN UK (8.8), Game Informer (9.25) and CVG (8.4) all have very positive opinions. The reviews of "The Big Two", GameSpot (6.7, ignored by the official site) and GameSpy (with no rating as I write this, but mentioning "sloppy level design, disappointing multiplayer implementation"), are a large stain on an otherwise beautiful painting.

Update: Gamespy has put up a full review, giving the game a score of 3/5 Stars and a multiplayer rating of "fair".