Din's Curse: Demon War Demo

Dungeon crawlers are all about taking a seat in front of your computer as the sun goes down and getting back up when the annoying morning light bounces off the screen into your bloodshot eyes, with some epic loot to show for it and that maxed out fireball you always wanted. However, it is definitely not easy to develop such a game, since it needs much more than a lot of monsters and shiny armor pieces.

Din’s Curse: Demon War is a combat-oriented RPG that takes its inspiration from the greatest jewels of the genre, such as Diablo and the new arrival at that time, Torchlight. In essence, the central idea behind it is quite simple and unimpressive: clear dungeon after dungeon and avoid getting killed in the process. The execution, however, is what sets a good hack & slash apart from an ordinary clickfest, because you really need to feel like the time you spend mashing the mouse buttons is not in vain and that you have a good time doing it.

Unlike Diablo, for example, Din’s Curse is much more libertine, in the sense that there is no clear main plot, just a long string of dark caves infested by hell spawns. There’s always a town on top of them, though, which means that its inhabitants are prone to demon attacks. Your goal is to clear the dungeons and go back to defend the town when the creatures reach the surface, otherwise you risk losing valuable NPCs, including quest givers, armorsmiths and the like. Thus, also unlike in Diablo and most of its clones, there’s the prospect of failing at your task and moving on, because you won’t manage to save every town and you have to let the demons feast once in a while.

There are six classes and eighteen specialties to choose from in the beginning, but they can be combined in almost one hundred and fifty ways over the course of the game, depending on how you choose to spend your skill points. This makes every playthrough special, coupled with the fact that the NPCs, the dungeons and the towns are randomly generated every time you start a new game. The difficulty adjustments available in the beginning also make the experience much more interesting, because you can use checkboxes to make your character unable to equip any item unless it is cursed, suffer from hunger, or generally be unlucky and with less of a chance to find items or gold.

Playing the game itself should come naturally if you ever had any contact with the genre, although it is pretty easy to pick up even if you haven’t. Click on monsters to attack them, use spells and special abilities, gather epic loot and try not to die. It’s horrendously simple, yet very effective and complicated at the same time, if you want to make the most out of your character’s unique skills. The monsters are big and angry, the armors are shiny and powerful, the NPCs are dull and uninteresting; in a word, a dungeon crawler by the book.

All things considered, Din’s Curse: Demon War is about as good as it can get when it comes to gameplay and general atmosphere. The graphics quality may be a bit of a disappointment for the DirectX 12 generation, but once your blade cuts the head off a demon half the size of the screen, you forget all about tessellation and soft shadows. You can clear the dungeons together with your friends, since the game comes with a solid multiplayer component that allows you to share the experience.