Demigod (PC)

This game is superficially shallow and after a couple of hours play you know the game about as well as you need to. I suppose for this reason it doesn't bother with a tutorial, it's just as easy to just play and learn yourself. That said it is actually great fun for the half hour that each game takes. Just because it's not an involved game does not make it boring, it's just one that you don't need to invest time in the game. You load up and play, and drop again. A great time filler here and there.

Previous Stardock games like Galactic Civilisations was a 4x game that took days if not months to complete a single game. That was a game you could spend many days trawling the online strategy guides to get the edge. Next, Sins of a Solar Empire an RTS took anywhere between 2 hours and 10 hours to complete. Now Demigod, which is short and to the point 30 minutes to an hour each game.

The setting: Each game takes place on a board like arena, making me think of 21st century chess. You control a character which is either an assassin or a general. Each board has capture-able flags. Each flag gives you control of an asset, that could be a buff (+15%HP for all units) or a portal where an army will spawn periodically. Or perhaps a gold mine, producing income. There are also a lot of towers on each map. These are defensive structures that should be destroyed to make progress. Finally each board has two home camps, containing a shop selling upgrades, a health and mana crystal to restore your character and a citadel. Your citadel can also be used to purchase upgrades for your war effort. There are a number of different game objectives that you can use to win, but essentially the mission is to advance to the enemy citadel and destroy it.

Units: There are three main types of unit, normal grunts that spawn out of portals you control and the player controlled Assassins and Generals. Assassins are good against individual targets like buildings or other gods. Generals on the other hand are individually weak but are able to command a small personal army, and immerse themselves in the thick of the portal spawned armies. As you fight you earn experience. The assassins keep their power themselves when they level, so while they start quite weak and can become very deadly against a single target. Their job is to eliminate key threats. The Generals use their experience to level their armies and the effect they have over their armies. Be that attack speed, Area of Effect damage, healing etc. So a General is pathetically weak at the start. But in the later part of the game they are extremely powerful when in a throng of grunts.

Experience & Gold: You can choose how to level your character, which skills or spells to maximise. With the gold you earn you can either spend at the shop on yourself, or on the citadel making environment work harder for you. Upgrading grunts, towers etc. Due to the speed of each game you will never maximise your unit and the citadel upgrades, so you need to work out quickly where to spend your levels and gold.

Strategy: Why the game is better than most people yet realise is that the skill comes in countering whatever choices your opponent makes. If your just playing against the AI I imagine this game would have a limited shelf life. Against the AI no matter how you spend you're gold and Experience your going to win. But against a team of Humans you need to adapt to their strategy. If they decide to go all Assassins they are going to have 3 strong units. You could for example spend all your gold upgrading your grunts and towers to bog them down. Or if the other team is making a big push to your citadel, do you counter it, or spend the time capturing flags and portals on the map in the hope of turning the tide before they destroy your citadel. I'm not sure if I will still be playing this game in a year, But I will be playing a lot over the next couple of months at least. The game has not been out long, so beyond the point click and bash, not much finesse and strategy has emerged, yet!

The other huge plus is that unlike the trend these days; Stardock does not use DRM. Thank God there are some publishers that prefer to not treat their customers like criminals.

This is a great looking and sounding game, however it has two fatal flaws. The first is that getting a game set up takes far too long. Expect to spend up to twn minutes waiting for games to begin and even after they do begin you will often find that the game is very unevenly matched with maybe 3 human players vs you and to computer players. Worse still even when you are lucky enough to get a nice 3 human vs 3 human game one will often leave early or turn out to be completely useless leading to a very disatisfying experience. This leads to the second fatal flaw - the community. Unfortunately this game is seemly populated by hordes of rude, tetchy angry people.

Every once in a while a game comes along that surprises with how good it is. This is one of those games, not since C&C Renegade have I had so much fun playing an online game (not tried many to be fair). I had the demo of this off fileplanet on my computer for a month and couldn't be bothered firing it up because as usual I thought it would be rubbbish.

How wrong I was, haven't stopped playing all week! If you like strategy games and Diablo type games then this is for you.

Some connection niggles and with it being computer to computer rather than played over a server you are at the mercy of players with poor connections/rigs with getting a game to run smooth. My only criticism is people that leave the game if they aren't doing well after only a few minutes and moody people, overly critical of less skilfull team mates but kids will be kids and this can be said of a lot of online games.