The Dark Eye: Demonicon Review
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Introduction
The Dark Eye: Demonicon is an action RPG from Noumena Productions, a developer that had previously focused on iOS games. As its name suggests, Demonicon takes place in the universe of the Dark Eye, which was also the setting for the Realms of Arkania trilogy and the Drakensang games (plus a couple of adventure games recently). If you've never played a Dark Eye game before, then you don't have to worry. It's a standard fantasy setting (at least so far as I've seen), where dwarves sound like they're from Scotland, female characters wear as little clothing as possible, and uncountable monsters try to kill you, and so if you're familiar with RPGs then you should be right at home.
Story
Demonicon takes place in and around the city of Warunk, which is one of the few bastions of safety in the demon-infested Shadowlands. You play a young man named Cairon, and you've just come to the city along with your sister and father. Since you're considered refugees by the local authorities, your father comes up with a scheme to marry off your sister to a city official, which will net you citizenship and get you out of the disease-ridden slums district, where refugees are forced to stay.
Of course, your father is hiding some things from you. Not only is your sister not really your sister (which is a good thing considering that the game forces you to be in love with her), but your father has a dark past that's about to catch up with him, and which will quickly thrust you into a dangerous journey where you'll have to deal with demons and demon worshipers, not to mention bandits, zombies and spiders, oh my.
The story works pretty well. It's mostly about you and your family (or "family" depending on your perspective), which gives you plenty of motivation to take part, and it also includes some twists and turns to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, the writing isn't compelling. I'm not sure if this is a translation issue, but the characters in the game have zero personality -- even the villains are kind of dull -- and so listening to their dialogue has all of the excitement of reading encyclopedia entries. But if you wade through the codex entries and conversations, then there are enough layers to keep you wondering what's going on, and to drive you forward through the game.
Characters
When you start a new game, the only thing you have to do decide is which difficulty setting you're going to use, from easy to hard (with nether hellish becoming available once you've beaten hard). That's because your character is always male and always named Cairon, and the game uses a classless system, where you only improve your attributes, talents, and spells once you start playing.
Each character has eight attributes. Four of these -- agility, constitution, courage and strength -- are considered combat attributes, and they affect how much damage you do, how often you score critical hits, how much health, endurance (for combat moves), and essence (for spells) you have, and more. Meanwhile, the other four attributes -- charisma, cleverness, dexterity and intuition -- are considered adventure attributes, and they affect your non-combat talents, including fast talk (for negotiating with people), perception (for discovering hidden objects), and blacksmith (for disarming traps and improving armor).
Characters also have a collection of combat moves and gift spells available to them. The combat moves are organized in a tree, where you might have to unlock one or more moves in order to get to the one you want to use. Spells on the other hand are available at once, but they come in a chain of four versions each, where you have to learn the weaker versions of the spell to get to the more powerful versions. An example combat move is roundhouse, which hits all enemies around you. An example spell is ice lance, which freezes targets in place.
Interestingly, Demonicon does not use experience points or levels. Instead, as you defeat groups of enemies or complete quest objectives, you earn adventure points, which you can spend to improve your attributes or talents, or use to purchase new combat moves. For spells, the game uses gift points, which you earn simply by casting spells during battle. I like systems like this since they force you to make a lot of decisions as you build up your character, but unfortunately in Demonicon you end up earning so many adventure points and gift points by the end of the game that you can max out almost everything. That makes your end-game character a little boring, and it also hurts the replay value of the game.
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.
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.
