Publisher: Soldak Entertainment
Developer: Soldak Entertainment
System requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/Win 7/Mac OS 10.4, 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or better CPU, 256 MB RAM, GeForce 2 series or better graphics card, 200 MB hard-drive space, DSL or better Internet connection for online multiplayer
Genre: RPG
Release date: Available now

When I look at MMOs, I often forget that there are in fact other genres that exist in the world; sometimes it’s a little tough for me to believe. Everything to me nowadays is either massively-this or shoot your best friend for a laugh-that. When I take a break from those sorts of games, I like to sprawl out on my office chair, grab my favorite pre-packaged snack cake and go back to my roots: dungeon crawlers. I admit it’s been a long time since this pastry-induced gaming euphoria has taken hold. Its previous appearance was during my time competing on the ladder while playing another dungeon-style game. I’m glad to have briefly encountered this feeling once more while checking out the Din’s Curse expansion, Demon War, brought to you by Soldak Entertainment.

Demon War begins with a wandering undead horde who no longer have a master, destroying things and wreaking havoc. The gist of the story is: zombies attack human city, demons like zombies; zombies attack demon city, demons no longer like zombies; humanity is somehow at fault for this, as previous members of their race, once dead, are now zombies infesting cities. With the demons of the world unleashing their aggression on the undead, it won’t be very long until they turn on those who they believe to be the cause of this situation. As your second life of servitude to the god Din continues, your task is to defend humanity from the demon army.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve played a dungeon crawler before. If you haven’t, it’s a point-and-click game in which you go through catacombs doing quests for townspeople. The deeper you go into the dungeons, the more you can be rewarded with either coin or item. Generally, these games are an angled topical view, with monsters of all shapes and sizes ready to run at you, gnawing at your limbs in the process. The difference between Din’s Curse and some of these other games is that it evolves based on the decisions you make. If you choose not to attack a certain creature, there can be repercussions on the town. If you don’t help an NPC, they can become angry at your character, and who knows what’ll happen next? Your actions solely drive the story and current events.

I haven’t seen everything as of right now, and I fear I might never see it all; Demon War has a lot going on as far as playability goes, and this is a major plus for me. The events that are caused by my actions (or lack thereof) can make the world dive into a right mess; it’s a chaos I can take. I spent a lot of time looking at the NPCs to see exactly how interactive they are with their surroundings, your actions and the actions of other NPCs. They make the same choices as we do and some of the same mistakes we would; there’s a lot of love put into them and the world in general. I would often make fun of a character with a peg leg in another game, but I fear if I did here, somehow a horde of skeletons would make their way into town to attack me. I’ve never seen this before, and it’s fascinating. The last feature I really enjoyed was in character creation, where I was able to make a hybrid of a new class, Demon Hunter, and another class, Demonologist, to support it. This makes me wish other games allowed for this, even if it was just in single-player mode.

The things I dislike are really just footnotes to any indie developer. These devs are generally a single person or a small group trying to share an idea to see if it catches on, so don’t take this too much to heart. To me, the creatures in Demon War are almost a reskinning of existing monsters, and it threw me off just a little bit. Graphically speaking, nothing was really done with the expansion; it continues trudging forward looking similar to something I would have played four or five years ago. My main complaints are that I feel I needed a personal assistant to complete my tasks; there’s so much to do, I just felt it was easy to get sidetracked from my current goals. My other main complaint, and this is just me, was a lack of gore. I understand that the game wasn’t intended to be bloody, but when I split a demon’s skull open, something shooting out of it would’ve been nice. I hope this is something that might be added in a future expansion of the series.

I was warned that there was a chance I wouldn’t like this game by friends of mine who had played it, but for an indie title, I was pretty impressed. Once you get past your internal snobbishness about the graphics and find the charm and fun of the world, it makes all the difference. If you happen to be a current player of Din’s Curse who’s on the fence about purchasing the expansion, which is currently priced at $9.99, I would recommend you buy it. If you’ve yet to even look at Din’s Curse, the price of the original version of the game has gone down to $19.99 and might be the fix you need while you’re waiting for other games to be released. Hell, I’d even play with you.

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