Its really a shame that gameplay can ruin a game with such wonderful graphics and sound.
User Rating: 5.7 | Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone PS2
I don’t understand why developers can’t ever seem to get it right. Dungeons and Dragons gameplay is about more than just hacking and slashing your way through mindless, annoying monsters. Yet still, most of the D&D based games out there are just plain crap hack and slash games, and unfortunately, Demon Stone falls into this category. The game would honestly be great if they would have put some thought into the gameplay. The graphics are nice, the sound is nice, and the story is well done. You follow the path of 3 characters: An elf names Zhai, and warrior named Rannek, and a mage named Illius. You are inexplicably drawn into a fight to…you guessed it…save the world. Somehow you have all been tied into this by what appears to be magic, or perhaps fate. At any rate, you must put an end to some nasty evil that has been unleashed on this realm. All the good elements of a story are there; overwhelming odds, interesting characters, and a plot that unfolds nicely. The story wouldn’t actually make a half bad movie, and the games cut scenes, although done with the game engine and not movie, and pretty compelling and interesting. The game has a great story. Graphically the game is wonderful too. It has a style about it that just feels right. Everything in the game is very vivid, from the very beginning as you are walking through a forest, the forest actually seems alive. When you first see it, you will believe whole heartedly that this game is going to rock. Even the first level and sequence of fights is great. There is a dragon flying around setting things on fire, and it will definitely keep you on your toes. The whole environment is just mesmerizing really, all the environments are. The game has great graphics. The sound is top notch too. I haven’t been this impressed with sound in a long time. The scores are nice, and fit the mood of the levels you are in perfectly. They may not be the most musically challenging, but they set moods great and are nice to listen to. The sound effects are good too. The sounds of metal on metal as your sword strikes armor, or the sound of wood shattering when you break a catapult. Its all very nicely done. When Illius uses his magic, the fireball and lightning sound effects are not overdone, and just right. Yet this isn’t even the most impressive part of the sound, it’s the voice acting. The likes of Patrick Steward (Captain Jean Luc Pickard, Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile) do some of the best voice work I’ve ever heard personally. The wonderful voice acting in this game adds so much to the story that it makes it almost seem as if you are playing out a movie. The game has great sound. So lets review, the game has a great story, the game has great graphics, the game has great sound, well it can’t be that bad right? Well, we haven’t talked about the gameplay yet. I’m sure you can guess by what I said earlier that it pretty much bites. I’m not adverse to hack and slash games, in fact, I kind of like them. For this game however, that’s all there is. You will hack, and slash, until your mind caves in. They break up the monotony of it once in a while with some stealth gameplay using Zhai (which they should’ve done more of), or a lame jumping puzzle, but most of the time you are just tapping away at the X button. Sure, the game has some combos and special moves, but they are pointless. Its not even worth doing them just to show off and see what they look like, because they don’t vary that much for you to be able to tell the difference. You can upgrade your weapons, armor, and buy some new moves between levels using gold you collected for the items and experience you’ve collected for the skills, but its pretty pointless as well. You will get more powerful, you will look cooler, but it doesn’t help the gameplay one bit. Its simply because the new combos and moves just aren’t that different from the basic combo of tapping X 3 times. You can’t break up the monotony with Illius’ spells either, because even they are drab and boring. The magic missile and the fireball look only a little different, and have pretty much the same effect just varying in power. The lighting bolt looks cool, but its just a more powerful version of what you’ve been doing all along. So, what are you back to doing? Hacking and slashing. The game does have the fact that its short going for it, and for a while I thought that it might be its saving grace. Hacking and slashing for 10 hours isn’t all bad. Then you get to the redundant objective mission. I won’t give it all away, but it involves protecting things against hordes and killing things in an annoying, redundant fashion. Plain and simple, that’s where the game takes a serious dive. I played through the mission once, and after I failed to protect what I was supposed to, I put the game down in disgust and went about my business. Its not that the mission was especially hard, although it was a challenge. It’s the fact that is redundant, boring, and so mind numbing that if you don’t make it through the first time you will never want to make it through. Plain and simple, the gameplay is horrendous. Demon Stone had a lot of potential, and it was realized in all but the most important area; gameplay. If developers would learn that D&D is so much more than cutting up foes, then maybe just maybe we will get ourselves a good, maybe even great D&D based video game. Until that time comes however, stay clear of this game unless you have the chance to rent it for less than a dollar. Even then it will only be good so you can briefly appreciate the graphical design and wonderful voice acting.
