Demigod comes from Stardock. The guys behind the downloadable game service impluse. Which you MUST use to either just run the game or purchase a digital copy and run the game. This maybe a Windows Live labeled game but there is NO WINDOWS LIVE SUPPORT. Gas Powered Games are the developers behind this title and perhaps their Real Time Strategy pedigree; i.e. Supreme Commander might have contributed to the overall brilliance of the this title.
The game is a real time strategy game with Role Playing Game conventions like leveling up your Demigod and a Massively Multiplayer style online permanence with their Pantheon mode which allows players to battle for one side or another in a war between Demigods. But this isn't exactly "your father's RTS."
Before I start talking in depth about Demigod, let's get a few things out of the way. First, Demigod doesn't come with ANY instructions if you purchase it online through Impulse. Demigod has no tutorial missions or modes. Demigod has a single player mode consisting of Skirmish(battle against the A.I. in a single match), Tournament (Battle the A.I. over the course of 9 matches to see who is crowned a god!). There are some minimal walkthroughs online and some videos you can watch but it all kind of boils down to starting out on Easy difficulty on Tournament mode and keep making the game harder until your confident enough in your abilities to play in multiplayer. Which you can play Skirmish or Pantheon much like the single player mode. Except that Pantheon is an on going battle between the Light and Dark Demigods. To this day I still am a little confused as to why the developer didn't make a tutorial mode. Also there is a simplistic voice over cinematic at the beginning of the game, but that's it. No real story or even a pretense as to one. Which is fine, but I would have liked at least a few minute winning cinematic after winning the Tournament mode. It's not a big deal, but it certainly would have added depth to this basically multiplayer only game.
Demigod allows you to directly control one unit on the battlefield or arena. This unit is your Demigod. These Demigods are broken up into two categories; Generals and Assassins. The Generals can directly summon warriors to fight for them but are a little weaker fighters. Assassins cannot summon any warriors directly but are stronger in and of themselves. As you can see from these screenshots the Demigods are probably the best rendered aspects of the game. But all most everything in the game looks great. I can only dream of it looking better. Only a little... Please just a little more...
The other units on the screen that fight for your side come through summoning portals and are just cannon fodder more or less. But killing these units on the enemy's side are your main means of leveling up. Also, upgrading your citadel to upgrade your portal units also are vital considering a match can be won or lost based on these upgrades. Everything in Demigod is upgradable. Your Demigod's can be decked out in a large number of ways. You get a talent tree to put points into from killing folks, that will allow you to make the Demigod your very own. You can become good at destroying structures or other Demigods or even some of both. Also, you can buy armor and artifacts for your Demigod that boosts their stats.
These portal summoned units aren't within your control and sometimes they do some stupid things but in general they attack what they should be attacking; however, they will NEVER retreat no matter what happens. Knowing when and how to attack along with these units is one of the things that you have to get used to, when beginning to play the game.
The scale that was being shown in early trailers of the game, showed gigantic arenas in impossible vistas with huge Demigods and a perspective that was set more from the ground up than other Real Time Strategy games. Perhaps a little more similar to Warhammer Dawn of War 2 or Maybe Company of Heroes. A little tighter focus. The actual game is more like a regular RTS with only a little tighter focus than normal. So the game isn't down to up or top down. It's more like from somewhere at angle, and it's angling down. The Demigods aren't very large except for Rook(the guy on the box cover), who is a little smaller than the Rook shown in the trailer but he's still pretty large. If this was to make the minimum specifications for mid-level PCs lower, I don't know. But the game is a little less impressive than it began.
The above problems are certainly in no way deal breakers; their addition would just have made the game that much better. The real problems with the game seem to be very minor. For instance, there are only around 9 maps which are all various sizes which means that each size of map only really has about 2 maybe 3 maps. It would have been nice to have more than that, even at launch. Also, the Demigods sometimes get hung up on corners, which is only slightly annoying but can be a pain if you aren't babysitting your Demigod 100% of the time.
I won't mention the standard problems of matchmaking and getting into games with other players online. Why? Because it's pretty much a lock that all of the problems will be resolved in short order considering that the game is basically an ONLINE MULTIPLAYER GAME. It's certainly bad form to have such problems. But considering all the problems that Gas Powered and Stardock had at launch it's to be expected. If you don't all ready know what I'm talking about head over to www.demigod.com and I'm sure you'll run into an explanation.
So what do I REALLY think of Demigod? Well, I own the game and have played quite a bit of it, including competing in two Pantheons. I'm currently in the process of getting 100% completion on the achievements and playing all the Demigods through on the single player Tournament mode. Yeah, I'm kind of in to the game. There currently isn't a demo for the game, so it's a BIG commitment. However, it's only $39.99. According to Stardock they are working on more content and a demo. So wait if you must, but this game is wonderful and addicting. It doesn't seem like it would be, but it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment