Dementium: The Ward was an odd but brutally difficult little gem for the DS. I really didn’t think you could make a decent shooter on a handheld, but that game showed me that it could be done, and done well. Even so, I passed on the sequel, regretting it until I saw that it was coming to PC. Dementium II HD had me hoping it would be ported with the same skill and care as the recent Resident Evil: Revelations, and it was. Unfortunately, it was a port of a game that was nowhere near as good as Revelations, and while the game may have been revolutionary on handhelds over three years ago, it’s only a sub-par release on a modern PC.
Dementium II HD puts you in the boots of a man who’s undergone some sort of strange brain surgery in a prison, and as a result you have weird visions of monsters and other worlds. At least, that’s what seems to be happening as the game lays out its plot through notes that have been left behind and a few very poorly voiced spoken sequences. I don’t exactly come to my shooters for riveting stories a lot of the time, and many of them don’t even need a story at all. This game hits that weird middle ground in storytelling where it probably would have been better off without any of its story at all. As is, the effort feels full of lame cliches and goes out of its way to say things a focus group would agree was spooky. It’s not bad since you can just ignore the story bits like I started to, but it’s still a wasted effort in the game.
Once you’re not paying the story any mind, the gameplay doesn’t really pick up the slack. The first issue I had right from the start was that there was no way to change the mouse/controller sensitivity, and it seems to default to pretty high. For someone who’s used to twitch gameplay this won’t be an issue, but anyone who slows the mouse movement down for more deliberate shots (or one of us console kiddies using a gamepad) will have a hard time with the game. The game’s reticule just moves around so fast that it’s very hard to take a direct shot at an enemy, and I always found myself sweeping past enemies in one direction, then the other. I typically had to wait until the enemy was pretty much crawling down my throat before it took up enough of my screen that I could actually hit it.
Once you run out of bullets you’ll stumble across another little issue that drove me crazy. Your character in the game doesn’t reload automatically if you pull the trigger when the chamber is empty, requiring a manual reload every time. It’s a small problem that I fixed quickly, but every once in a while I would forget about it and click away a few unloaded shots before noticing the chamber was empty.
So reload your gun, stupid. Well, it’s not always all that clear when your gun is empty. For many of the guns, there is very little effect to tell you that you’re shooting them. The handgun barely shows any kind of light, simply bucking up a bit when fired. Not only that, the sound when you fire the handgun is so quiet I thought it didn’t have any firing noise. It does have it, but it’s hardly noticeable, especially if an enemy is around yelling at you. Since you’d only be firing the gun when an enemy was there and they all yell something, it’s actually quite easy not to notice you aren’t firing at all. I often thought I was just missing because the reticule wasn’t spot-on, but it was actually because my gun wasn’t loaded. Later guns like the machine gun aren’t as bad, although the shotgun is criminally quiet and still when fired.
This also made the game feel like nothing had any stopping power, which is a gripe whenever I’m playing any game where I’m shooting things. When I fire a gun in a game, I want a sense that it is causing some damage to whatever it hits. Gears of War excels at making the guns sound like they’re ripping their targets apart, making every pull of the trigger into an event. In this game the shots are these little puffs, and all the enemies do is jerk back a little bit to let me know that something hit them. This slight flinch never seems to change whether I hit them with a knife or the shotgun, and the lack of any great sound design on the weapon firing means it’s hard to get any enjoyment from firing these pretend guns. I get more of a reaction when firing a Nerf gun than I do the weapons in Dementium II HD.
There are melee weapons available if you’re having too hard of a time aiming the guns properly or have just lost patience with them. The knife was a pretty solid weapon to use, mostly because it didn’t need to reload and I could only hit things up close anyway. I also found it worked wonders to just circle strafe around many of the game’s enemies, as even the ranged ones weren’t very good at drawing a bead on my character if I shuffled around a lot. Some of them take quite a few hits to put down this way, but it does work a whole lot better and easier than trying to hit them at range.
That being said, the dodgy mouse movement will still make your life difficult. When moving around it’s easy to sweep your aim too far, so when strafing it’s not hard to turn and face the complete wrong direction while trying to hit something. The melee weapons also have a hit distance that’s hard to gauge, so some strikes I thought would hit would miss while some wild swings would cause damage for reasons I couldn’t even begin to guess. This makes the wild mouse movement a little easier to tolerate when it’s working for you, but sometimes you’ll practically be spooning the monster and you still won’t be getting any penetration.
The monster designs themselves are pretty varied while you’re fighting with the combat. While the basic melee enemies are everywhere, and show a lot of messed-up details (Think the syringe monsters from The Suffering), there are many other weird creatures to kill. There are several different variants on floating heads that will scream and fly around to attack you with explosions, shots, or just by ramming into your face. Weird crab creatures and pulsating blobs will also chase you around, as do frog monsters and ordinary police men. It’s a weird grouping and many of them vary up combat with erratic movements or combat styles, meaning the monsters do add a lot of variety to the gameplay.
Like I said, they’re pretty messed up looking, too. The only drag is that these monsters come from a port of a DS game, and not one with as much cash and support behind it as Resident Evil: Revelations. These things were never meant to be seen up close, and as such have large details on them that would make them stand out on a small screen but make them look downright goofy on a large one. Many of the floating heads just look stupid and silly as a result, and the almost overwrought basic monsters have so many details on them that are meant to freak someone out that they just look ridiculous. It’s fine to have weird, sickening monsters in the game, but the overabundance of strange little details or just plain ugly character models made them all look bad. I was never even close to scared at any point in the game.
I was annoyed, however, when I ran into one particular monster. There is a shadow creature that wanders some of the more maze-oriented areas of the game, and I was actually nervous to touch one of them when I first saw it. It looked like pretty bad news, and when I noticed the looping corridors nearby, I figured I would have to kite the thing around a bit and sneak by. It was cool that the devs made that clear just through the map layout and the creature’s general vibe and presence, but I found I often only had just enough time to squeeze past them without being touched. If there was a corner I had to make before one would reach me, I’d have to be making a full on run toward it before I’d even respawned or else the shadow would catch me and I’d have to try again. Getting caught only means having to fight four basic enemies in an arena so it’s not too bad, but if the same shadow catches you over and over again while you try to figure out where to go in an area, you’re going to get sick of it fast. It’s not long before these things travel in packs, either, so get ready for some major aggravation when they’re around.
The locales get pretty dull after a few minutes, too. Most of the game takes place in prison walls, and while there is the occasional town to break up the scenery, most of the game looks pretty flat and dull before long. Colors tend to stick to realistic browns and grays, and while the monsters show some different colors, even they often stick to darker versions of bright colors. Everything looks drab as a result, and the lack of variety in the locations only makes looking at the game that much less interesting.
The sound design isn’t much better than the visuals. There were some nice ambient tracks in the game that almost made it sound creepy, but none of them are particularly interesting or well-done. Even so, I never got to hear much of them because the game plays a simple tune whenever an enemy is nearby, not only making it impossible for something to sneak up on you and scare you, but also making it really hard for the game’s soundtrack to set any kind of mood. The game just kept stuttering between songs, and it was jarring for me while I played it. I could never settle in to any one atmosphere, always switching between combat and what could have been tense exploration. It felt like the game was always changing gears as a result, and I never quite felt comfortable in any mindset as I played.
The rest of the sound is a mess as well. The jumping sound makes me think that both of my character’s legs are broken, since the man screams every time he takes a single hop. The voice acting in the game could not possibly be more flat as well, making me thankful there wasn’t much of it. The various monster screams and noises were all muddled and uninteresting, filling my ears with aggravating noise every time they showed up. Adding all this onto guns that were nearly silent meant that it was hardly worth bothering to keep my headphones on at all.
What gets me the most is that this game probably played quite well on the DS when it came out. There just wasn’t much like this series on handhelds, and the controls in Dementium:The Ward were enough to make this man believe that shooters could come to the DS. Porting an old game like Dementium II to PC was a mistake, though, as the series mainly stood out for being functional and decent on a handheld. It did its job well on a system that didn’t seem capable of it, and while I enjoyed that experience there, its port is far too clumsy to be enjoyed. Having to see DS graphics blown up to such huge sizes doesn’t do the game any favors, forcing players to see graphics at large sizes they were never meant to be seen at. The music and sound is also weak compared to its predecessor, making me wonder why they didn’t test the waters by porting the original Dementium over instead.
There is an acceptable action game lying under all of Dementium II HD ‘s myriad problems. If you just want to shoot some freaky monsters in an ugly old prison, you can do it. Even so, there are dozens of other, better shooters and horror games for your money — ones that make better use of PC controls, sound, and graphical power, so you’re better off steering clear of this game.
Dementium II HD is available for $14.99 on Steam.
