Assassins have a handy cloak ability that bestows them with varying degrees of invisibility. Priestesses can respawn allied souls - along with all their skills - on the battlefield. Mages can summon a spherical shield that protects anyone inside it from hostile spells.
There are too many sorcery-centric highlights that impact team strategies to mention them all here, but rest assured that there will be plenty to keep spell-casters smiling.
If incantations aren't your bag of magic beans, there's a diverse range of other natty class skills on offer. Archers can obtain multiple types of arrow, assassins can play dead and set various traps, warriors have a hard-hitting running attack, and so on.
There are over 50 skills spread across the character classes, but rather than being available right from the off, experience points are awarded throughout the campaign and can be used to acquire new skills and upgrade existing ones.
In short, the more experience you earn, the more you can expand and evolve your character's skill set and the more deadly your character will become. Skills are carried over between maps, so as a Crusade campaign progresses, characters become fully pumped killing machines with an ever more impressive repertoire of offensive and defensive moves.
While a few niggles - namely the fiddly nature of attributing skills on the fly and the curse of spawning too far from the fray - did sour the experience a smidgen, Crusade mode certainly offers a new spin on the multiplayer mash-up. The map by map war of attrition promises to provide a stage for some truly epic skirmishes and team players will delight in the emphasis placed on cooperative assaults.
After experiencing Dark Messiah's multiplayer, we feel that the single-player campaign will still be the game's main attraction. However, that's more a testament to the tantalising brilliance we've witnessed so far of the sure-to-be-something-special solo mode than a criticism of its group mosh effort, which still looks more than capable of casting its own spell of enchantment over fantasy fans seeking a decent swords 'n' sorcery ruckus.
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