Game Review: Dementium II HD

Dementium II HD

 

Game system: Windows (Steam)

Release Date: 17/12/2013

Developer: Renegade Kid, Memetic Games

Publishers: Digital Tribe

I never got the chance to play the original Dementium II on the Nintendo DS, as the original Dementium was rather dissapointing, but with the Windows HD release coming on Steam, I thought it was a time to give the game a chance.

Dementium II puts you in the shoes of a William Redmoor, a protagonist of whom we know nothing about, as you wake up in a cookie cutter prison for the criminally insane, recovering from a brain surgery. The game does not take any time throwing you in an almost too familiar scenario, where you travel between the real world and a twisted, nightmareish version of it (Silent Hill, anyone?). As originally released for the Nintendo DS, this is not necessarily a bad thing, as you shouldn't be expected to take time to watch excruciatingly long cutscenes or read a lot of backstory on a handheld console. In fact, I find this to be one of the game's better aspects; you can easily jump in to kill some monsters and enjoy some horror action. The game manages to fill you in on most of the backstory behind William and his surgery with completely optional letters you find scattered all across the world, which also help build the atmosphere. This is also used as an exposition system to hint at enemies you might encounter in the future and works nicely in this regard.

When up close and personal, some of the monsters actually look very good.

As a sequel, Dementium II has fixed a variety of issues that were hindering the original game. One of the biggest issues I had with the original game were the respawning enemies; every time you came back to an are you already had cleared, the monsters would re-appear. While this has been fixed in Dementium II, the developers tried to "even it out" by adding monsters that you cannot kill. Oftentimes ending in situations where the level is designed around long corridors with maze-like twists, forcing you to run for your life. Other times they can just be avoided without issue. While this mechanic works on its own very well in games like Clock Tower, in Dementium II, it's very disconnected from the general gameplay and just feels tacked on.

Although the game bolsters a good variety of monsters to kill, they're brought down by the lackluster AI, some hitbox issues as well as generally unimaginative designs. While the constantly respawning enemies from the first game are gone, the game sadly features the Smash TV trope (or Painkiller for a more recent example), where you get locked in a room and have to fight waves after waves of monsters before the doors are unlocked again. This can get very tedious with the broken hitboxes and twitchy pain frames some enemies have, making you waste ammunition in addition to the wasted time, luckily these areas are few and far between.

Dementium II comes with a handful of puzzles, as is expected from originally a stulys controlled game. Sadly they are there just for the sake of having puzzles, and do not bring any real meat into the game. There hasn't been proper effort to make the puzzles intriguing or even remotely challenging, and they just end up feeling like extra work, especially when you can see the solution to each puzzle upfront.

Sadly the puzzles are only there because it's a genre trope.

The game features some backtracking and keycard-based gameplay (door codes, items to use on special doors, etc.), but it's still very much a linear progression all the way through. Fortunately, Dementium II has a few different types of areas to explore. In addition to the prison, you'll get to see some snowy villages, caverns and service tunnels. Gameplay-wise, the game comes as standard as they get; you get a variety of weapons to kill monsters with, ranging from knives and bone saws to shotguns, assault rifles and explosives like dynamite. The blatantly obvious medical kits and the less common adrenaline syringe, which gives you a temporarily speed boost, are also there.

As far as the game's contributions to horror games, it's fairly predictable with monsters strapped in chains, covered in teeth in places they should not be. The monsters and locations are nothing you will remember after finishing the game, but do their job well enough for a budget title. Dementium II still manages to pull of some, at least remotely distressing atmospheres with its use of sound and (cheesy) imagery. The music and sound design is not commendable, but it is there, following the tropes of standard piano driven melodies and footsteps heard in the background. Sadly the developers opted for a dynamic combat music system, which just ends up being more jarring than they possibly intended. Every enemy is treated as its own encounter, so more often than not you end up hearing the music stop and restart multiple times, even in the same room, as the enemies do not necessarily engage in combat at the same time. This also works to ruin some of the tension as sometimes the music tells you if a monster is around the corner.

This new HD version of Dementium II has been built on the Unity engine and is fairly well optimized. It's lacking in the visual settings as expected; you only have a few pre-set resolutions to choose from and you're limited to a slider between "Fastest" to "Fantastic" for the visual quality, hardly enough for a PC game. While this is a standard Unity feature, I wish the developers would have given us more control over the settings. The audio seems generally done well enough, considering it's originally for the Nintendo DS. The level architecture seems identical with the original DS version, but every texture and most of the models have been remade to bring the game to the PC. While the Nintendo DS roots are obvious from the low-poly level architecture, the new textures in addition to some decent lighting effects translate fairly well to the PC. Some areas do look obviously low fidelity, but in general I think the game manages to look very solid.

The relaxing snowfall helps bring atmosphere to the game.

The game only has a single "save profile", but stores a save for each of the save locations (which interestingly enough are glowing red mirrors, ring any bells?), so you have a fair amount of progress backlog. I did encounter some game breaking bugs, like trying a door puzzle without having the combination, then having the door no longer be operable after obtaining the combination. Just make sure not to re-save in locations all the time and you should be fine. Additionally, it seems like the game binds menu to "ESC" by default, but it doesn't register as a keypress in-game. I got around this by binding the menu to F1. A fairly big mistake as far as controls go.

Sadly, I found out that during the five hours that it takes to beat the game, the game never kicks on a higher gear and the storyline exposition seems to be very bare bones: after all is said and done, you end up with more questions than answers. In fact, it feels like a fan-made horror modification to a popular game, rather than a proper horror game on its own. It's clear it wanted to be the Silent Hill of the Nintendo DS, but what we ended up with is something more close to the Half-Life 2 mod Grey. In the end, the game is a clumsy, budget horror game with apparent flaws and a complete lack of new ideas, which only help drown it in the sea of other mediocre horror games. It's not a particularly bad game, but doesn't bring anything new to the table, and as such, I can only recommend it if you know what you're getting into.

Score: 2.0/5
Review by Daedolon 28/12/13.