The Dark Eye: Demonicon Review
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For the combat half of the game, you frequently fight groups of enemies, including spiders, zombies and humans. The enemies have enough variety to them to keep things interesting. Spiders emit poisonous clouds, demons are sometimes shrouded in flames, and certain zombies explode when they die, which means you have to be careful about where you're standing when you attack things. You also have to be careful when facing humans. Many of them get combat moves and spells just like you, and they can be dangerous in a variety of ways.
When fighting, you're always alone. There aren't any companions in the game. But that's just as well since there are plenty of things your character can do in battle, including parrying and counter-attacking, dodging, whacking away with a melee weapon, throwing knives, performing combat moves, or casting spells. You also have to pay attention to when you attack. You steal essence from your opponents when you hit them (you need essence for casting spells), but if you deliver your hits with the right timing, then you start a chain of blows, and the further you get along this chain, the more essence you steal. The chain can also lead to you landing more critical hits or healing yourself (at least according to the manual; I couldn't tell if it ever actually happened), which is useful.
Along with battles against regular enemies, you also get to face off against boss creatures a few times in the game. These battles are usually tough, and they always have a trick to them. For example, one of the first bosses you encounter can heal himself by using nearby statues. You're not allowed to interact with the statues, and so to defeat the boss, you have to trick him into destroying the statues himself. I found these boss battles to be satisfying, especially when I switched from the normal to hard difficulty setting, and they helped to save what is otherwise a B-grade game.
Finally, by completing quests and defeating enemies, you of course find lots of loot. Oddly, the vast majority of this loot is labeled "junk" and can only be sold, and of the rest, about half of it is involved in alchemy in some way, either as potions, poisons or ingredients. There just aren't all that many weapons or pieces of armor for you to use, which is a little disappointing, and almost all of the top tier items come to you as quest rewards, which reduces the need for shopping and the haggle talent.
Sound and Graphics
Demonicon looks and sounds like a budget title. The voice actors read their lines clearly (which is good because the subtitles are frequently tough to decipher), but only rarely do they infuse them with any emotion, making the game sometimes dull to listen to. Demonicon really could have used an over-the-top villain, or some humor, or just about anything to provide some variance to its one-note tone.
As for the graphics, I recently went back and played the Mass Effect trilogy, and I don't think Demonicon fares well against the original Mass Effect (released in 2008) let alone to the slickly polished Mass Effect 3 (released last year). You might argue that this comparison isn't fair to Demonicon, but Kalypso Media has it priced at $40 right now, which means they're considering it to be a serious title. But the character models in the game are just okay, the locations only look okay, and the spell effects are -- you guessed it -- okay. You can tell what everything is supposed to be, but there isn't anything interesting or exciting about how the game looks.
Conclusion
To sum up The Dark Eye: Demonicon, I'm going to steal a word from the previous paragraph: "okay." Demonicon is a middling game with probably more bad points than good, but it's playable in a Dungeon Lords sort of way. At some point when the price drops down, you might even want to try it out. The Demonicon campaign lasts about 25 hours, so it's the sort of game you can pick up and play quickly, and if you don't like it then it's no great loss. But just to repeat: you should wait for the price to drop. Everything about Demonicon made me think budget title, and that's where your expectations should lie.
