Book of Demons

Review

Hey, you! Are you here to face the ARCHDEMON? You see the old Cathedral on the hill over there, this is where you’ll find the entrance to the dungeons. Oh, before you do so, you might want to visit our village square. We have a fabulous fortune teller, a barmaid, a healer and a sage. They will help you in your quest to defeat the ARCHDEMON. I hope to see you again champion and good luck!

Book of Demons is a hack and slash / dungeon crawler game where you take your champion into dungeons setup in a paper verse world.

As this game is still in development, you can choose between two classes of heroes at this stage: a warrior or a mage. One of the first aspects of the game that I really like is the fact that you can choose how long each dungeon can be (you have to unlock it though). If you have thirty minutes to spare, then make them short but if you have a couple of hours on hand, make the dungeons bigger.

There are three quests to complete in this game with three bosses to defeat. The first one is the cook, then the Antipope and the almighty ARCHDEMON! Before you get face to face with one of these bosses, there are plenty of dungeons to go through.  As you progress through the game, you’ll find cards; these are usually in golden chests, but may also drop when you eliminate a high ranking enemy. They are basically skill cards with three different coloured backgrounds: the red ones are for potion (health, mana, etc), the blue ones are spells and the green ones are abilities. There are runes cards too, which can be used at the fortune teller to upgrade one or several of your existing cards. As you find a new card you can allocate it to your hero, but you will only have three open slots out of ten at the start of the game. To unlock the other slots, you’ll need coins, so make sure you pick up everything in each dungeon and visit the sage to purchase your new slot.

You character will gain experience as you slaughter your enemies, and each time he levels up, you will be given a choice to get either an additional life point or mana point at that time. If you decide to take a life point, the mana point will be placed in the cauldron which you can purchase back from the barmaid.

There are stacks of different enemies, some with melee and other with long range weapons. Some will explode while others might teleport themselves to another location to make it harder for you. Fire and freeze spells will come at you from every corner – it’s hectic and really fun!

Your character will have to follow a specific path within the dungeon, and it will be equipped with an automatic attack as soon as he is within a certain range from his enemies. However, as it is a click type of setup, you can move your mouse on an enemy and click on him until he dies. Click on all pots and chests, as a fair number of them have coins in them. If you are running low on life or mana, you can use a potion if you have a few in your inventory.  Otherwise look at the red and blue fountains. Click on them and your life or mana will be fully regenerated.

I really like the artwork; it is just splendid. The soundtrack is not great and could be improved. However, I do think that the voice over is well done. Mouse and keyboard for the control are just fine.