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IGN Review of Dementium 2
By now you should be familiar with Renegade Kid's work on the Nintendo DS; if not with 2009's Moon than certainly with the original Dementium: The Ward released in 2007. The small development studio seems to find itself at home in the criminally under-supported portable first-person shooter genre, and the team's third handheld FPS design continues to show the technical abilities of its programmers and the visual prowess of its graphic designers. It's also a lot of fun and certainly challenging even if the adventure's a little on the short side, and it thankfully addresses the problems of the first game by fixing the issues that stuck out in original design.
Dementium II isn't really a direct sequel to the first game's story as it's a standalone adventure with new characters and a fresh, creepy locale. But it does link to the first game with similar enemies and a familiar mature, violent, and bloody setting. Like the original Dementium, Dementium II isn't going to scare the bejeezus out of you, but it'll certainly give you the willies with creatures that giggle maniacally at you as you shoot them point blank, or scream as they float effortlessly over your head while you investigate the blood-soaked halls of Bright Dawn Treatment Center.
In this sequel, you waken on a gurney in a locked cell with absolutely no knowledge of who you are or why you're there. The mystery unfolds as you move through the hallways, and you're introduced to the off-putting and seemingly random mechanic of sliding from location to location. As you progress through the game you realize you're shifting between parallel universes, but early on it's difficult to tell whether it's actually happening or if it's just all in your head...
All of this takes place through the eyes of your character, so you're controlling this game as a first-person shooter: the stylus-focused "mouselook" style enables tight and fluid movement while the game's incredibly smooth 60 frames per second rate keeps up with the action without a hitch. Ammunition is a rare commodity in Dementium II, so the game ends up being a "first-person stabbing" game for much of the first half of the five-plus hour adventure, which is a shame because there are some pretty fun projectile weapons to shoot here: nail guns and assault rifles are available but the strategy in this game is to only use them for emergencies. You do eventually end up with an infinite projectile weapon towards the end of the game, but it's not quite as fun to use as the handful of guns available to you earlier in the adventure. Luckily you get more opportunities for weapon use in the unlockable survival mode that puts all the focus on the action side than the exploration and story of the adventure portion.
There are also some impressive boss battles that focus on the old-school pattern recognition mechanics of the 8- and 16-bit era. This review has been kept relatively spoiler-free up to this point, but wait until you get a load of the towering behemoth that caps off one of the game's five chapters.
As mentioned earlier, Dementium II addresses a lot of the issues from the first game: no cheap respawning enemies when you leave a room and return, for example, and the map, now always on the lower screen, highlights all the places you've already visited. And the flashlight mechanic, once the annoying Doom 3-style "switch between weapon and torch" style, can be used with single-handed weapons. The game also controls better with easier weapon-swapping and inventory management interfaces. A lot of the fixes have Renegade Kid's Moon to thank for their implementation because they were introduced in that title, but if you're going from Dementium: The Ward to the sequel, the difference is night and day.
The storytelling in Dementium II is still a little clumsy, with dependence on awkward full-motion video cutscenes and random letters scattered around to fill the player in on what's going on. The ending payoff for all your hard work has the impact of a thrown wet sponge, and only when you sit back and think about all the events that preceded it will it really make you go "hmm." After it's been given some thought, though, it's a semi-clever twist, although it's something that's admittedly been done to death in other stories.
But like Renegade Kid's other DS games, it's the technical and visual side that takes center stage in Dementium II. The game looks fantastic, not just thanks to the silky smooth framerate but also because of the detail in the environments. There's a lot of variety this time around; you'll find yourself wandering from the darkened halls of the treatment center into the bright whitewashed snow covered exteriors, and then back to some incredibly horrific locations too off-putting to describe. But for a game that's meant to be a horror game, "off-putting" isn't exactly a negative.
Dementium II isn't really a direct sequel to the first game's story as it's a standalone adventure with new characters and a fresh, creepy locale. But it does link to the first game with similar enemies and a familiar mature, violent, and bloody setting. Like the original Dementium, Dementium II isn't going to scare the bejeezus out of you, but it'll certainly give you the willies with creatures that giggle maniacally at you as you shoot them point blank, or scream as they float effortlessly over your head while you investigate the blood-soaked halls of Bright Dawn Treatment Center.
In this sequel, you waken on a gurney in a locked cell with absolutely no knowledge of who you are or why you're there. The mystery unfolds as you move through the hallways, and you're introduced to the off-putting and seemingly random mechanic of sliding from location to location. As you progress through the game you realize you're shifting between parallel universes, but early on it's difficult to tell whether it's actually happening or if it's just all in your head...
All of this takes place through the eyes of your character, so you're controlling this game as a first-person shooter: the stylus-focused "mouselook" style enables tight and fluid movement while the game's incredibly smooth 60 frames per second rate keeps up with the action without a hitch. Ammunition is a rare commodity in Dementium II, so the game ends up being a "first-person stabbing" game for much of the first half of the five-plus hour adventure, which is a shame because there are some pretty fun projectile weapons to shoot here: nail guns and assault rifles are available but the strategy in this game is to only use them for emergencies. You do eventually end up with an infinite projectile weapon towards the end of the game, but it's not quite as fun to use as the handful of guns available to you earlier in the adventure. Luckily you get more opportunities for weapon use in the unlockable survival mode that puts all the focus on the action side than the exploration and story of the adventure portion.
There are also some impressive boss battles that focus on the old-school pattern recognition mechanics of the 8- and 16-bit era. This review has been kept relatively spoiler-free up to this point, but wait until you get a load of the towering behemoth that caps off one of the game's five chapters.
As mentioned earlier, Dementium II addresses a lot of the issues from the first game: no cheap respawning enemies when you leave a room and return, for example, and the map, now always on the lower screen, highlights all the places you've already visited. And the flashlight mechanic, once the annoying Doom 3-style "switch between weapon and torch" style, can be used with single-handed weapons. The game also controls better with easier weapon-swapping and inventory management interfaces. A lot of the fixes have Renegade Kid's Moon to thank for their implementation because they were introduced in that title, but if you're going from Dementium: The Ward to the sequel, the difference is night and day.
The storytelling in Dementium II is still a little clumsy, with dependence on awkward full-motion video cutscenes and random letters scattered around to fill the player in on what's going on. The ending payoff for all your hard work has the impact of a thrown wet sponge, and only when you sit back and think about all the events that preceded it will it really make you go "hmm." After it's been given some thought, though, it's a semi-clever twist, although it's something that's admittedly been done to death in other stories.
But like Renegade Kid's other DS games, it's the technical and visual side that takes center stage in Dementium II. The game looks fantastic, not just thanks to the silky smooth framerate but also because of the detail in the environments. There's a lot of variety this time around; you'll find yourself wandering from the darkened halls of the treatment center into the bright whitewashed snow covered exteriors, and then back to some incredibly horrific locations too off-putting to describe. But for a game that's meant to be a horror game, "off-putting" isn't exactly a negative.
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