DEMONICON Review: The Perfect Game -- Perfectly Average, That Is
There are many things in the work which are perfectly average. Vanilla ice cream, a glass of water, a 72 degree room. Perfectly and utterly average. Demonicon should be added to that list. The Dark Eye: Demonicon is the most perfectly average action roleplaying game I have ever played.
The game is set in The Dark Eye, a German-made fantasy setting that is so popular it even outsells Dungeons & Dragons in Germany, which is saying something. The mechanics of the game mostly come from the pen and paper game, apparently, I have never played it, which is a problem. Since the rule set is based on a pen and paper game, which are usually hundreds of pages long, it is complicated to say the least. There are plenty of acronyms to research, stats to memorize, and rules to figure out. You can upgrade your stats and skills at will using points (AP) you gather from using your skills or by killing enemies. You gain more AP by using higher level skills and, I assumed, by killing more difficult enemies, but it seems to be random. Some enemies that aren't difficult give you few points while difficult ones sometimes give almost none. Then there is a completely different pool of points called GP which you get by using your spells in combat, which you can only spend on buying or upgrading your spells. There are way too many ways to spend your AP, but there are far too few ways to spend your GP.
With only 4 spell branches to choose from and each new spell basically just an upgrade to the previous one, there might as well be only four spells, which is pitiful. The rest of your stats, skills, and professions all come from the same pool, so you have to constantly decide if you would rather become more proficient in the sluggish combat or the purely situational skills. The skills can in turn give you items and AP, but survival can get difficult enough at times that you’ll find yourself desperately reading obscure tooltips trying to figure out which stat will help keep you alive slightly longer, and you’ll have to read a lot because the explanations are far from clear.
The controls in Demonicon are good and horrible at the same time. If you want to play the game with a gamepad, good for you, the controls will be fine. To cast spells or use special abilities you do need to hold down one of the triggers, so it is difficult to quickly swap from casting to rolling, but you get used to it pretty quickly. The keyboard and mouse controls, on the other hand, are absolute garbage. The hotkeys are mapped all over the keyboard and trying to cast spells and move and aim all at the same time is a monumental endeavor.
For a game that revolves so heavily around fighting, the combat is surprisingly boring. You have a melee attack, ranged attacks, special moves, and magic, which sounds like quite a wide variety of ways to play, but there are basically only 4 spells, melee attacks are basically just button mashing, the ranged attack is basically only good for charging your Essence (the resource you use to cast spells), and the special melee moves are so expensive to purchase you don’t really end up with that many unless you want to sacrifice your base stats or skill progression.
Defensively, you have a few options. You can either parry, where you still take quite of bit of damage but have the opportunity to counterattack, or you can dodge roll. Dodge rolling works like basically any other ARPG. You hit a button, you roll out of the way, easy peasy. As far as parrying goes, I would hardly call it working at all. You hold down the parry button, and if you press any other button or stick at all, the parry will be cancelled, so you have to hold perfectly still, desperately hoping no one comes up from behind you. If someone happens to attack you from the perfect angle, then you have the chance to counterattack, and it actually is percent chance. It is tied to a stat, which takes a long time to level up. So, the vast majority of the time you will try to parry and end up just getting smacked in the face by your enemy, unable to do anything about it. Having your counterattack chance rely on a stat makes it absolutely worthless. Why would you take the chance to take damage and not do anything about it when you can just dodge roll away from the attack entirely?
So combat becomes just rolling around in circles occasionally throwing your knives to gain more Essence to spend on your spells and occasionally attacking enemies before frantically rolling away.
The thing that really kills the combat for me is whenever you use an attack, the entire game slows down for a short amount of time, like in 300. Unlike 300, the bullet time attacking doesn’t make the combat more “Epic” or exciting, it just slows it down and make the combat feel incredibly cumbersome and dragging. Even the faster weapons feel clunky and unmaneuverable, which is incredibly frustrating.
The story in Demonicon actually surprised me on multiple occasions and not always in a good way. Semi-incest seems to be a common theme and comes up quite often, even forcing you to either involve yourself in an incestuous relationship or force someone into a horrible situation. What kind of choice is that? Besides that one odd moral crossroad the game forces upon you, the rest of the ethical choices you encounter are actually rather well-crafted. There is rarely a choice that is clearly Good vs. Evil, most decisions you have to make have some things that are good and some...not so much. A good example is a quest where you have to decide to either kill a bad guy and as a reaction kill twenty of his captives, or let him go, where he will undoubtedly continue killing, but not in your city. More will probably die if you let him go, but by killing him you might as well be killing the prisoners yourself. Lots of the decisions feature this same depth, which is refreshing. As much as I loved Infamous and Infamous 2, the clearly two dimensional alignment tree can get boring. For as good as the decisions are, the script is pretty bad. And boy, is there a ton of it. There is an immense amount of dialogue and not all of it is good, or even average. Most of it is voice-acted if you have a thing against reading, but having to sit through the hours of horribly fake accents is a fate I would only wish on my worst of enemies.
Like the rest of the game, the graphics and audio are decent, I guess. The visuals are varying arrays of browns, with hardly any flair. I understand that the game is set in a more “realistic and dark” fantasy world, but that doesn’t mean the entire planet has to look like someone spread mud over it. There are tons of graphical glitches, that I thought were just my computer at first, but after investigation turned out to be universal. If you skip through dialogue, then as the camera jumps from character to character the game will have to reload their textures, but it always starts with a really low resolution texture first, then the high res texture. So conversations cause people’s armor to blink in and out as more or less detail gets loaded. It can get rather distracting at times. The character animations are also just off enough to cause most of the character interaction to be downright creepy. Like dolls controlled by a ghost, they wave their arms around and nod at each other in quick, wooden motions.
In the end, I don’t know who to recommend The Dark Eye: Demonicon to. Players that haven’t played many RPGs like this one would be better off playing Witcher or Dragon Age II, and if you are a dedicated ARPG fan, then the problems with Demonicon will be horribly blatant and probably kill the experience for you. If you think you can handle the clunky combat and the complex character system so you can experience the interesting moral dilemmas, you could give it a try. Otherwise, you really aren’t missing anything by giving this one a pass.