The Dark Eye: Demonicon Review
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Interface
Demonicon uses a camera that floats above and behind you, which means of course that you move by pressing the WASD keys and you steer by moving the mouse. You also use the left mouse button to attack, the E key to throw knives (you get an infinite supply), the Q key to block, and the spacebar to dodge. All of this is pretty standard and works effectively.
Unfortunately, Demonicon employs an odd system for hotkeys. Instead of allowing you to map any combat move, spell, or potion to the 1-0 keys, combat moves are mapped to 1-4, potions are mapped to shift plus 1-4, and spells are mapped to the right mouse button plus 1-4. If you know anything about controllers then you can see why this mapping is used, but it works poorly, and you can't do anything to adjust it (all you can do is change the button you press along with the 1-4 keys). All too often I triggered a melee combat move when I was trying to cast a ranged spell, causing me to charge at an enemy I desperately wanted to stay away from, or I got my fingers off the WASD keys while trying to press shift and a number key so I could quaff a potion.
Demonicon also has an unfortunate save system. Instead of allowing you to save whenever you want, the game uses a checkpoint save system, where saves are only generated when you do certain things while working through quests. These saves are fairly frequent, but let me repeat, they only trigger during quests, and so if you enter a new part of the city and then take a half hour to talk to people and go shopping and spend your adventure points -- and subsequently wander into somebody's cellar and get killed by a trap (which are almost always lethal), then you have to repeat it all. I don't mind repeating battles where I die, but I'd just as soon not repeat the busywork. Worse, the game doesn't allow you to name your saves, and it doesn't create anything resembling a profile, so if you have multiple people trying to play the game on one computer, then you're going to have all sorts of fun trying to figure out which saves go to which people.
If that wasn't enough, there are other problems. First and foremost, all ranged attacks are targeted, but you're not allowed to choose the target yourself. The game does this automatically for you, and while it usually picks the enemy closest to you that you're facing, sometimes it just picks a random enemy within five miles of your position, with a preference for enemies hiding behind walls that you can't hit. The game also likes to put up invisible walls around battles, to prevent you from moving too far away from the battle location. But since battles often require a lot of moving and dodging (especially on the higher difficulty levels), all this does is get you killed, because it's easy to get boxed in by "nothing."
When games are developed for the PC and consoles, the PC version almost always suffers greatly, and Demonicon is no exception. The game is playable with its current interface, but the interface causes a lot more headaches than it should, and many of the problems seem like they could be fixed with a minimum of effort. I mean, the PC version doesn't even have tooltips, and how tough could they be to add? But the developer has already said that they're not going to alter the save system, and so I'm not expecting anything else about the interface to change, either.
Gameplay
Gameplay in Demonicon is split pretty evenly between talking to people and fighting groups of enemies. The conversations are necessary because the main questline involves you figuring out how you gained the ability to cast spells, why your sister isn't really your sister, what you father was up to in the old days, and how you can stop a demon cult. And to learn these things, you have to learn about a lot of people, including certain things about the Dark Age's pantheon of gods and demons, which you probably won't be familiar with if you haven't played many games in the setting.
Each time you talk to someone, you get a circle of possible responses, numbered from 1 to 6, and you can either click on the response you want or press the associated number key for it to say it to the person you're talking to. Conversations aren't timed, and while the response text you see is only a taste of what your character will actually say, it was a rare occurrence for my character to say something the opposite of what I intended. Most of the time the responses are just requests for more information, but sometimes you get responses that require your talents. For example, when accepting a quest, you might receive a fast talk response that allows you to request a better reward.
Along with conveying information, conversations also allow you to accept quests. The main questline is completely linear, and while there are some side quests, you only accept them and turn them in at bulletin boards, and they don't do anything to add depth to the world you're in or the characters you meet. For example, at one point you're tasked with finding five pearls. You get a sentence or two about why you should look for them, and then you get some adventure points after you've found them. That's it.
The main questline is more interesting, and it's clearly where the developers spent most of their time. As you complete the main quests, you learn more about who you are and what's going on, and you explore the city of Warunk, plus a nearby swamp and some sort of grandiose church. The locations are rendered well, and all of the interiors and exteriors are unique. You won't see any evidence of cutting and pasting in Demonicon.
Every so often during the main questline, you have to make a decision. This can be a simple thing like choosing to side with one faction over another, but sometimes the game dips into gray areas. For example, one of the first things you do in the game is hunt down a cannibal who is holding some people hostage. When you reach him you learn that if you kill him then his hostages will die. So do you kill the cannibal and the hostages and end the threat, or do you allow everybody to survive -- and perhaps the cannibal to feed again? Unfortunately, most of the decisions don't impact anything in the game. If you choose a faction then you get (roughly) the same quests regardless, and for the cannibal you just see the body of the cannibal strung up in town (or not), and people say slightly different things to you in a couple of places afterwards.
