A few months ago, I played a hands-on demo of Demeo. It’s a turn-based game that features a bit of DnD, a tinge of card playing, and a strategy game that puts you to the test. It is as advertised when it comes to its execution, at least in its gameplay construction, but it does stumble here in there with longevity concerns and features a camera system that, while manageable, can be frustrating at times.
Anyway, let’s talk about this.
Fun dungeon
The basic concept behind Demeo is that it’s a turn-based game with DnD dice-rolling and a card system to boot. You move around dungeons, defeat monsters, and make your way to a key-holding behemoth that you must defeat to exit the dungeon and progress in the game. The dungeons are multi-tiered and feature some wash-rinse-repeat baddies, but also feature some massive bosses that are as mean as they are dangerous.
To take on the dungeon and its occupants, you have five champions to choose from, each with its own traits and unique attacks. They are a well-armored knight, a wizard who is good for ranged attacks, a bow-wielding badass that can hit their mark well, a sneaky backstabbing thief that can stealthily get in/out of places, and a musical instrument wielding bard that sometimes sings the shit out of people. Not a bad variety of characters. What’s cool about these sets of characters is that you can choose multiple of the same type, if you have a favorite (you can have up to four in a party, but less if you’re feeling adventurous). For example, the fifth time around in the game, I chose multiple bows because hitting from far away was nice. These are the champions, and each can hold several power cards in the game that allow you to perform powerful moves against your enemies or to support your fellow champions.
Keeping with cards, the cards are probably one of the more interesting parts of the game. They come in a variety of flavors and can be picked up in dungeons or bought at the end of each round. The cards range from simple healing potions to powerful hurricanes that can take out enemies. You can find these cards in treasure chests in dungeons, or you can earn them by killing enough enemies. You can also buy them at the end of each round if you pick up enough coins as you venture. Either way, they’re good to have and a point of interest when you’re trying to strategize on how to complete a level. They’re certainly an important piece if you hope to have any success in the dungeons. Quite honestly, they’re one of the better parts of the game.
Getting back to the players, how do you move around and function during the game? Quite easily. If you have ever played a game like Advance Wars on the DS, then you get the basic movement and attack concept. You’re given action points in the game. These points translate to movement. For example, if you have two action points, which you start out with at the beginning of the game, then you can use both to walk X number of spaces that are highlighted in yellow — twice. If you want to walk once and then perform an actual action, you can split the points to do so. The other action could be a melee attack or the use of a card in your deck, depending on how many action points the card requires to perform. It’s a simple concept that works well within the confines of Demeo and it makes sense how important this part of the game is to develop a healthy strategy to win the game.
As for the attacking in the game, as mentioned above, you’ve got a melee attack, ranged attack, and/or card attack. When you perform one of them, you get a dice to roll. The dice has on it icons that are: a single sword, double sword, and a skull. While the die is littered with single swords, which do single attacks, there is a chance that you can roll a double sword and double-up on the attack numbers. If you roll a skull, you get a randomly aimed attack that can do no damage, hurt an enemy, or hurt your own teammate. Yes, that happens. The die is interesting, as it feels fair when rolled. What I mean by that is the die roll feels like some dice you would roll in real life. It doesn’t feel automated. It feels like a random chance, which is what you want out of your virtual dice.
Now, as you traverse through the dungeons in Demeo, you will find multiple doors to go through which lead to multiple ways to get to the locked exit. You’ll find a lot of interesting and cool ways to go to get to the end. The goal of the game is to get as much money and treasure as possible, defeat the key-wielding main enemy, survive, and progress. If that means you get one champion through the locked door and to the next dungeon, then so be it. Not everyone in the game must make it through the dungeon, as one person is the only requirement to get to the next stage. If you can do that, everyone in the party is revived and prepped for the next go around. Knowing the best way to go, and sometimes going a certain way to avoid enemies, is part of the strategy and the construction of Demeo. It certainly makes for a thick amount of strategy. By the way, if that gives you any sort of hint about the difficulty of this game, then you’re on the right track with what you should be prepared for in Demeo. It can be very unforgiving at times, which makes it more engaging and interesting.
Enemy A.I. is good
One of the more impressive parts of Demeo is how smart the computer player is during a fight. They know when to surround you in a small room, they know when you’re weak, and they know when to run away. It’s irritating as it is beautiful to see in motion. There was a time during the gameplay review session that my surviving key-holding character was just a stone’s throw away from the exit. The enemies knew that most of my party was weak, so they decided to shift focus to my key character. Even after dropping an invincibility card (for three turns), they blocked the doorways and just kept kicking my butt until every character was dead. Again, it was impressive. It sucked but was impressive.
While I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed getting my ass handed to me in this game, I did appreciate the fact that the game was a challenge and that the enemies didn’t rollover. There are so many games in this genre that tend to only put the effort into the boss’ A.I.. Thankfully, Resolution gave the smarts to every enemy in the game. The enemies were truly bastards. And I enjoyed it.
Oh, and did I mention you start the dungeons over if you die? Yeah. An added element of difficulty. A cool one, though.
About that camera
As mentioned at the beginning of this review, the camera is a bit wonky but manageable. When the game wants to focus on a point of interest, such as a treasure chest or exit, it will float the camera towards that point of interest immediately. Once it does that, touch nothing on the keyboard or mouse to disrupt it, as it will reset back to the point which you started. Should you disrupt it, you’re stuck at that item of interest. Then you must use the keyboard (WASD) to shift the camera on the Z-axis while using the right button on the mouse to rotate the dungeon. You will do this quite often. Again, it’s manageable, but it doesn’t make it less of a distraction. For the last week or so, I have been wondering how Resolution could have made this better, but for the life of me, I don’t know. Someone who knows code and camera movements in games could probably figure it out, but until then it’s a juggling act at times during gameplay. Does it hurt the game? Not really, the core fun is still there and it’s entertaining. It is just a bit frustrating at times trying to see things.
Content
The content in the game is broken down into single-player and multiplayer. The latter of the bunch is a no-brainer when it comes to this game, as it’s more fun to play with friends than alone. Unless you’re like me, who likes to play games by himself. It’s tough to get people together to play sometimes.
Anyway, the single-player experience is how I went about this review. I enjoyed controlling multiple players and got a true tabletop experience, or at least harkened back to when I played with Transformer toys by myself in the 80s (my brothers didn’t like me, so I played mostly by myself – don’t feel sorry for me, I was happy). Anyhow, I found the experience challenging at every level, but enjoyed the structure that Resolution put together. My biggest worry for this game is how long the experience would last. You’re given three storybooks from Resolution. Each book contains multiple sets of dungeons and multiple bosses. The difficulty of the game will extend the game’s longevity, which is a clever way of doing things – very 80s arcade game methods. Once you’re through each book, then you’re on to the next one. For someone as inept as myself when it comes to tabletop experiences, this should last me quite a while. For folks that are hardcore players with lots of friends interested in Demeo, this might be a short trip. Regardless, I hope that Resolution has more of these games down the road because they’re certainly worth the time and effort to get through them. They’re fun as hell, full of strategy to delve into, and just a proper experience to go through when wanting a tabletop fix.
I’m hoping there is more content in the future.
Anyway, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Demeo is a game that emulates and excels in a tabletop and card experience. It’s the best of all worlds when you’re thinking of turn-based gameplay. If they can fix the camera somehow and reveal a roadmap to more content, it will be a permanent fixture in a lot of steam libraries.
