PC.IGN: The multiplayer serves as a prequel to the single player game which ties the new Crusade mode together. Dark Messiah multiplayer will come with the obligatory deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, but Crusade will be the main draw for its heavy team play mechanics and multi-game campaign. The story follows the fight between the humans and undead of the game world that leads up to the main character's romp through the game world of Dark Messiah. Each match will press players into the armies of each side of the conflict as they battle back and forth for control over the small area of the larger Dark Messiah map.

Gamespot: Though the multiplayer mode is in full production at Kuju Entertainment in the United Kingdom, its design is being spearheaded by Arkane designer Romain de Waubert de Genlis, a former producer and designer on the Battlefield multiplayer shooter series. Crusade, like Battlefield's conquest mode, will focus on capturing and holding various control points scattered throughout the map--control points that become "spawn points" (places where you can jump into the game again after you're killed in battle) when your side controls them. From what we can tell, most maps will start each side on opposite ends, with a few points near each side's rearmost control point. Though the maps we played on weren't perfectly symmetrical, we saw several instances of teams quickly snagging the first few control points, making coordinated rushes toward the middle of the map to seize the central point, and moving onward into enemy territory. Like with the Battlefield series, losing control points or dying will cost your team points, which decrease over time.

Gamespy: You'll get to pick from five classes: archers, assassins, mages, priestesses, and warriors. Archers are the class most in line with what you'd expect from a traditional FPS. They kill things with ranged weapons, though they drop like a stack of cards if you get in their face. As they level up, they get a cool spread of abilities that improve their ranged firepower; one allows them to nock two arrows at once, which increases the "loading" time, but allows their eventual out to act somewhat like a shotgun blast. Another allows them to zoom in with their sights for precision fire. Mages, meanwhile, can be thought of as mobile artillery -- at higher levels, anyway; in the game's current incarnation, they're more or less fodder for the more capable classes until they get a few levels into them. Once they do, however, they're mighty deadly. Their fireballs do insane splash damage, and if they invest their points correctly, then can control their trajectories post-launch. They're also capable of erecting magical shields to protect nearby teammates, which provides harbor from the assaults of enemy spellcasters.