Demigod

The Good
Review Version: v1.0
Review Date: May 30, 2011
Review Length: 7 (seven) pages.
Game Version: v1.0.0.97
Tech Specs Used: Intel Core 2 6300 1.86 Ghz CPU, 3 GB Memory, 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT Video Card.
Difficulty Played: Hard, Nightmare.
Preferred Character: Lord Erebus
Best Kill Count In Single Match: Oak (Nightmare) - 18 hero kills
Finished: Yes (Single Player, Tournament) – Sedna (Hard), Unclean Beast (Nightmare), Lord Erebus (Nightmare), Oak (Nightmare)
Last time played: May, 2011.

For those of you who have experienced Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a fan-made modified map which apparently became more popular than the original game itself: Warcraft 3, will be familiar with this game variant. You'll probably also be familiar that every adult in existence playing DotA will amazingly transform into a 12 year old emo-kid that tells everyone isn't doing their job and crying every time he/she gets killed.

Man, violence in games is nothing compared to the online multiplayer experience (never rated by ESRB or else they'll all get banned :p).

I. Introduction: For those unfamiliar with DotA
Note: This section may be skipped

DotA, the game that this game inspires from, is pretty much a simple concept. A game of push and shove between two groups of heroes aiming to clobber the other group to smithereens. The unique part of DotA is that it traditionally negates any strategic elements of the game: no structures can be built, minions cannot be controlled, allowing player to fully focus on attack, defense, and the development of their own character. Despite not having strategic elements, it does have a lot of tactical elements referring to the unique capabilities of each character, which usually have a specified role: berserker, tanker, healer, ranged, etc., and variations in between.

Although the usual objective is to destroy the enemy stronghold, structures are usually strong and pack a mean ranged punch. Players are then prompted to level up by killing off enemy minions. Eventually, both parties realize that the other side's heroes are getting to be a little annoying, although the primary reason is just to get acknowledgment for killing the other guy via the you got pwned default voiceover when a hero dies.

Yes, ego is the only good enough reason. Ask any fanboi.

Thus, most of the tactical elements in practice revolves around killing enemy heroes, which usually (and should be) difficult to kill. Teamwork usually is essential in bringing enemy heroes down, since they are pretty hard to catch when they're running off. This involves abilities that slow down an enemy or high damage skills (with even higher requirements) for the hopefully killing blow. Dead heroes also are inhibited from spawning after a few seconds or minutes. Which in the mean time, allows the opposing group to level up and wreck havoc.

II. Demigod vs. DotA
Demigods more or less introduces the same concept. Players choose one of the eight available heroes (noticeably a smaller quota than the available heroes in DoTa) and play in random noticeably artistic arenas. Unlike DoTa, Demigods has more strategic elements than the old push-and-shove approach. In this game, there are a few more variations in defensive structures, such as fortresses, light towers, and archery towers.

Most noticeably different is the capturing of flags, which if captured, allows bonuses for the controlling team (e.g. +10 mana per second). Additionally, minions spawn from specific flag locations. Controlling those flags will divert the allegiance of those spawning minions to the controlling team. More differences refer to citadel upgrades, which allow players to purchase team upgrades for a price of gold. Upgrading the citadel does offer a slight noticeable difference in (e.g. making minions stronger, building auto-repair, etc.).

The arsenal of items that may be purchased remain the same, including one store near the citadel and one artifact shop placed somewhere on the map. There isn't any weapon/item sets as in DotA in case anyone's wondering.

II. Demigod Characters
Characters are divided into two categories: assassins and generals. Not entirely sure why there is a categorization since there isn't much distinction in-game. Anyway, this should give you an idea of the playable characters:

• The Assassins
  • Torch Bearer
    The Torch Bearer is the equivalent to an elemental mage. He comes in two different skill schools: ice and fire. Ice spells focus on lowering the speed and attack rate of enemies with lower damage. Fire spells focus more on high damage. Area and long ranged attack spells are his speciality.
    Strengths:
    - Strong damage with fire magic;
    - Stun and weaken enemies with frost magic.
  • Unclean Beast
    You know those zombie dogs in the Resident Evil movies? Well, this is they're daddy and then some. Makes those doggies look like poodles in comparison. The Unclean Beast is the berserker character of the game. Capable of launching quick and fast melee attacks and running off to fight another day. If you like playing the Zerg in StarCraft, this doggy might be up your alley.
    Strengths:
    - Fast melee attacker;
    - Drains health.
  • Regulus
    The sniper range capable of shooting anything on the map from almost anywhere on the map. Fleeing wounded demigods are prime targets for execution. Camper players in Counter-strike will probably like this character best while also annoying every other player in the game.
    Strengths:
    - Very long ranged attack;
    - Powerful against Demigods.
  • The Rook
    Think mobile bastion. It's big, it's big, and it's big. Probably Omega Supreme's (from the transformers) ancestor, this character is about two-thirds the size of a normal character and hard to miss. Capable of building additional light towers and eating them like health potions. Being clobbered by his special ability club would probably make you see stars from the furthest galaxy in another dimension.
    Strengths:
    - Very durable;
    - Many independent weapons.

The Generals
• Oak
  Somewhere between a paladin and a necromancer. Odd combination, but this character has spirits as minions and most of his abilities are support-based. Handy fellow to accompany you in battle. Probably one of the strongest demigods when he reaches high levels and his spirit minions are numerous.
  Strengths (Default Description):
  - Protect and enhances allies;
  - Slows and weakens enemies.
• Queen of Thorns
  Cannot comment due to me starting at her specific body parts. Does give me new levels of understanding about the definition of siege engine though. :p
  Strengths:
  - Heavy siege damage
  - Powerful area damage
• Sedna
  The healer character and posses the best boobies in the game. The few times I did die while playing this character was when I was caught of guard watching her breathing. :p The AI version of Sedna in hard-nightmare levels is almost impossible to kill for some reason.
  Strengths:
  - Powerful healing spells;
  - Silences enemies.
• Lord Erebus
  The vampire of the group, starts as fastest character then later comes in second after the Unclean Beast. Could be interpreted as a rogue class character of sorts. Relies summoned minions freshly killed foes and if needed, hit and run tactics while biting foes to heal.
  Strengths:
  - Drains health;
  - Can move quickly into and out of battle.

Finishing a tournament will allow the a short voice-over story indicating your role and reign as a god as per character.

The Bad
The first people who worked in this game that should seriously start considering a career change is the gameplay programmer, the game testers, and the bloke oversaw it all. Well, that is if the screw-ups found in this game are warranted. That, I'll leave up to the readers.

As much as I dislike the later products from Blizzard, I have to admit. They got the basics right. Unfortunately, the only way you can respect what they've done in terms of gameplay, is only when you come up with a game that did it wrong...which then you realize: dang, those Blizzard blokes actually knew what they were doing (though I still don't like Warcraft III :p).

Despite DotA being a fan-made map, that game couldn't of worked without the default gameplay mechanics introduced by Blizzard. So this section is indirectly acts as a tribute to Blizzard, who keeps creating games that end up being cloned by other developers, but amazingly those products usually end up being the worst possible garbage in the gaming universe.

A Tribute to Blizzard

Part I – I lost my character!
Now one of the first problems playing this game is during the heat of battle when there are a lot of units involved...somehow you can't find your character. Clicking on the character's portrait will center on the character...but you still can't find him/her. Why? This how to a certain extent, what Blizzard noticed and what other developers seem to lack the brilliance to notice:

• Poor Choice in Colors
  Although the background arena is noticeably epic, it only lasts about three seconds, which of course by then you'll be too busy clobbering anything that moves. The only problem is, to clobber anything that moves, you'll just have to clobber the bad guys. Imagine one of those epic movies where hundreds of soldiers butchering each other on the battlefield. Now imagine if all those soldiers had the same uniform of similar color or patterns. Now imagine trying to find your mother there, where the only distinction is that she's carrying a halberd. :) Basically, that's what will happen. The colors used in this game are not distinctive enough. Sometimes one teams looks kinda orange, another kinda red. Great. Not enough color on the uniforms to distinguish the two. Imagine if you were colorblind or had partial colorblindness. This is what separates between good designers and copy-cat designers. The prior has common sense to think about the preferences of other people. There's reason why the default opposing colors in games (among others) are deep bright bright red vs. deep bright blue...and why those uniforms cover the majority the body: distinction. Even more ironic is if you are with the red team with red buildings, the map shows your team as green, and your units have green or orange uniforms, of which 80% of the body is covered in another color. Changing the team colors doesn't help either. Egad. Who oversees these decisions? Lead artist must have been busy doing something else.
• Vague Character Highlight
  Not exactly sure what it's called. So how do you know which is your character is Warcraft 3 and which ones are other heroes? Well, there that big massive shining circle thingy underneath all those heroes. Hard to miss. It's almost as big as the character. Now why would need something ridiculous like that I wonder? Remember you were trying to find your mother? Yep. Hi, mom. I can see that big shining circle under you, because the rest of your body is hidden behind all those units running around. In this game, that big shiny circle, high color contrast, moving patterns, that undoubtedly is used to help the player identify heroes, is replace with a small little circle, either ghostly green or light blue that just melds in the background. Easy to miss. Even more annoying is that little circle is useless in the heat of battle because of the next point.
• Layer Priority Disaster
  Ah, animations. Don't you just love them. Especially when they cover up everything you actually want to see. So you're still trying to find your mom, which is almost impossible to find her with all those soldiers running about, then you realize it gets worse: dust and blood are covering everything. Great, just great. Not only do you have trouble finding where the units are, dust and blood animations take priority covering everything else over. It even covers up that little vague circle that's supposed to be under your character. When there are more than 20 units moving around the place...it's chaotic view bodies and blood in the middle of a dust storm. Oh, wait. At least I can zoom in on my character...and track my character while I'm at it. That surely will help get out of this graphical nightmare. Then you realize...
• Total Eclipse
  There I was, trying to figure out where my character was in the midst of 30 something soldiers in mortal combat. Zoomed and tracked my character, so although I can't see him/her very well, I know at least that it's somewhere in the middle of the screen. Then something happens. The screen goes dark. What the...? The Rook just dropped in on the fun. The Rook is a basically a moving bastion of stone that is about two-thirds the size of any other character. The only thing larger than him is the Citadel...which is a dang building. He's even bigger and taller than the other buildings. So when he comes around, everything he's in front of is blocked from your view. Way to go, whoever came up with this character idea. You must be really pleased with yourself. :p Basically, sooner or later, it's easier just to avoid the Rook. Friend or foe doesn't matter. If he's there, you'll have trouble seeing squat, much less target something.

So, at this point, it's practically impossible to find where the beejesus your mother is, with all those units, blending color, dust, and finally the Rook doing his modeling routine. Might just let the AI play alone, since it's the only one that can see where anything is. :p

Part Two – Moronic Game Mechanics
Playtesting. Is it really that much of a difficult job to do? Just play. They couldn't even do that right.

Click. Click. Click. Huh? Why isn't my character moving?

For all the lousy excuses for playtesting. What did you guys do? Playtest this game for an hour and say it's done? I can't move my freaking character you dingbats!

Occasionally, the character gets stuck for god knows what reason. You'll have to click furiously all over the screen so it actually moves again. Sometimes, characters move but still get stuck, while doing a Michael Jackson routine in certain areas. Usually near towers sharp corners. Hey, look. They're moonwalking while being clobbered by enemy units.

Can't tell you how many times I died or the enemy that just needed a few hits left to kill, got away, because the character won't move. Not only can it not move, equally as often, the skills don't come out either. Some few cases involved you mistakenly clicking on a controllable minion (which is why it's a bad idea in the first place), however most cases still refer to the inability of the character moving.

The most usual case of not moving is when you use an offensive skill (which success) and for whatever reason the character just stops there instead of following the intended target. In the meanwhile, your looking at that enemy hero waiting for your character to clobber him/her, but the character never comes. Apparently your character has something better to do, like standing still.

There's also a less than a second lag, but that's one microsecond too long, too many, especially for multiplayer games. Other minor complaints are inability to click on the mini-map to move, inability to continue to move when a selected target dies (i.e. when select an enemy and it dies, your character stops moving instead of moving to that last location), inability to move in the direction of off-map selection, etc. There's also a small possibility that the game will hang during the loading screen. If that's not bad enough, restarting your PC doesn't help. You have to unplug the power supply for the CPU to start running again for some odd reason. It's happened to me three times already.

Oh, I haven't even mentioned the unbalanced characters. You can read those in other reviews. Too many, too tired.

The Bottom Line
Here I am, just playing the single player tournament. It's bound to be hit for multiplayer...filled with users that can't see squat with characters that are randomly immobile. :p

As much as I'd like to end this review with a more provocative personal insult of literature galore. I'm just stuck with one word.

Stupid.