Book of Demons

A masterclass in boring. The developers clearly had the single idea of "On-rails ARPG" and absolutely nothing else. The game is derivative to the very core, aping Diablo 1 in every way it possibly can even down to the tiniest of minute details, like one of the two penultimate bosses (The Warrior) spamming his pain noise similar to Lachdanan/HellKnights. Story, setting, progression, characters. Everything is straight out of Diablo 1, with a brief appearance from dollar-store Hadriel (Diablo 2). While it's clear this was their intention, it's done in a heavy-handed, referential fashion that feels desperate to cram in ANY quote or character just to try and massage a nostalgic players memberberries. This isn't just a minor nitpick, because it is reflective of the game as a whole. It is tepid slop that has nothing unique to say and nothing interesting to show the player. What 'new' things it does offer, are not new in a good way. Diablo summons rubber duckies! Enemies drop poop! Cain and Adria love-hate relationship, hehe!! Bet that won't possibly get old when every single gossip paragraph from BOTH NPC'S happens to mention it! So the story/setting/narrative is terrible, but what about the gameplay? Well that's boring too. So, again, being a game so heavily derivative of Diablo 1, the gameplay boils down to holding M1 over various groups of enemies. They -try- to switch this up by giving the player minigames to do while fighting. Monsters will have shields that you need to click on to break, and try to cast spells that you need to interrupt by clicking and holding an icon. You can get stunned, forcing you to 'catch stars' by mousing over them to return to normal. Some enemies have an enrage meter, and if you attack them too quickly they cast a spell and heal most of their health. Enemies are also weak to certain damage types. There are bosses that have many, or all, of these things at once. And do these cutesy little minigames liven up the drab gameplay? No! Hell no! They make it so, SO much worse! By the third act of the FIRST difficulty; which again, aping the Diablo series so don't think you can skip through the boring difficulties; you will be facing rooms full of enemies that all have shields, and spam spells, and heal, and run away, and summon adds, and have invincibility cooldowns and take half damage from your attacks AND, do you think any of that makes the game anymore difficult? No! You can leave and go heal whenever you want to, so your only risk of dying is by failing to shake yourself out of the boredom-imposed coma. It's all just a massive waste of time! Enemies casting spells are immune to damage until they either finish casting, or you break their channel. Enemies with shields take almost zero damage until their shield is broken. Invincible enemies that keep turning their invincibility on and off. Gargoyles that just cast slow spells, jump away and become invincible until you approach them. Enemies that crawl into the ceiling to do nothing for several seconds before coming back down. Every single enemy summoning more junk adds, that then summon their own junk adds, that then die and have adds pop out of their corpse. And the minibosses are just enemies that do all of those things at the same time, but with even more invincibility phases. It's like the developers actually sat down in the lounge with a notepad and brainstormed all the possible ways to make the game agonisingly boring and slow.

It was ok