It’s interesting to compare Demigod to another recent Gas Powered Games offering, Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander was supposed to be the ultimate massive RTS. The camera could zoom out to an almost planetary distance, multiple battles could take place over areas that dwarfed other RTS maps, and the game was supposed to be easier to play with two monitors, so that you could manage multiple views and areas at once. It was eventually ported to consoles, where it foundered, revealing itself to be a game almost too complex to even muddle through on a console.Ironically, Demigod feels as much like, if not more like, a true PC game than did Supreme Commander. This is due to it being a complicated RTS with little to no documentation or tutorial aid. There are complicated space sims and deep, old-school RPGs out there with much better tutorials and developer-produced aids.
The game was published by Stardock, and as a result, works within their Impulse digital delivery platform. The way multiplayer is implemented has led to incredibly unstable online matchmaking and play. Even after patches, the game still feels incomplete. So, Demigod has all of the hallmarks of “true” PC games. It’s complicated, deep, and deeply flawed. It also shares another aspect with some of its most respected PC brethren: it’s a great, sometimes brilliant game. It’s well-balanced, amazingly fun, and completely uncompromising in its artistic and design vision. It’s so uncompromising, in fact, it leaves a lot of its fans out in the cold. Even now, as Stardock rushes to fix matchmaking and various connectivity hitches, there are elements of the game itself that demand fixes. Even more importantly, this game needs a better tutorial, and by that I mean it needs any kind of tutorial at all.
There’s no excuse for dropping players into such a complicated environment with so little explanation. It might force people to learn for themselves, but it will also drive people away from truly interesting product. Demigod is much like Defense of the Ancients, the hugely popular Warcraft III mod. You control (directly) one Demigod, a powerful, levelable character whose task it is to destroy the enemy citadel. At your disposal are spells, items, and uncontrollable units who spawn out of gates under your control. You can take capture points all over the map that enhance your abilities and those of your allies, and even extra spawning gates.
The game boils down to aiding your fellow Demigods (if in play) and your minions. You are essentially there to break stalemates between mindless computer grunts, or distract enemy Demigods to allow your allies to move forward. As you do this, you’ll earn Favor points (used to buy one-time permanent upgrades), experience, money, and possibly items.It sounds simple, but in practice it’s very difficult to get a handle on. Demigods are divided into “Assassins” who can easily harry and kill enemy Demigods, and “Generals,” who can summon small, controllable armies of their own. Still, it would be presumptuous to think that knowledge of these two classifications gives the user a mastery over game mechanics. On the contrary, it merely serves to make your choice slightly more complicated, as you measure what you know of each class against what it’s “supposed” to be good at.
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