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Demigod

User Rating:

ESRB: Alcohol Reference,Blood,Fantasy Violence,Partial Nudity,Suggestive Themes
Publisher: Stardock
Genre(s): Strategy
Home Page: http://www.demigodthegame.com/

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By: Jarno Kokko Apr 28, 2009

Rough Start, But Shows Promise

Final push to crush the opposing citadel.

Undeniably the launch of Demigod is almost like a textbook example how to fail at it. The main issues are just hard to understand - I mean, servers going boom due to unexpected loads and matchmaking code turning out to be far too fragile to survive the encounter with the real world of wildly varying latencies and the veritable zoo of hardware configurations out there. Then there is the completely baffling design decision to ship without proper support for playing through super-paranoid NATs and firewalls. The days when a game developer can just say to the players "yeah, open this and that port and forward them from your router" are over - most online multiplayer games Just Work without any fiddling and if you release one that doesn't, it just won't fly. Stardock has the solution already in the works (the UDP reflector servers) but I can't understand how the issue wasn't identified and corrected already during beta.

Still, the technical issues are almost completely related to the functionality of getting a multiplayer game set up and they are obviously fixable. Once you manage to actually get a game going, the gameplay and overall experience is very good. The biggest outstanding issue in-game is the somewhat low amount of content for the price tag. Stardock has made promises about active Valve-style post-launch support with a constant flow of updates and additional units, maps and game types - with the first update probably being two additional demigods to choose from. Should all that materialize and add in a substantial chunk of extra meat to the game for free, Demigod may turn out to be a game that keeps on going for years and years.

Unfortunately we can't review future promises and at the moment, despite the quality of the game, Demigod currently offers too little meat for the price. There is no single player campaign and you can only play against bots and farm achievements before you have to turn to the multiplayer. You only get 8 demigods, a fairly limited set of equipment and skills and just a handful of maps. What is there is polished and remarkably well balanced, but there just isn't enough here to justify a $40 pricetag. It is up to you if you trust Stardock and Gas Powered Games to deliver the goods to improve the value. Still, Demigod is definitely a good, playable and interesting title and probably the best RTS offering in the recent months.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 2.4Ghz / AMD AthlonXP 2400+	Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz / AMD AthlonXP 3000+
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Graphics Card	Shader Model 2.0 with 128MB Video RAM	Shader Model 3.0 with 256MB Video RAM
Graphics Card Example	NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series / ATI Radeon X1600 series	NVIDIA GeForce 7600 series / ATI Radeon HD2600 series
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz / AMD Athlon64 3000+	Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 / AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Graphics Card	NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB / ATI Radeon HD2600 256MB	NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT 512MB / ATI Radeon HD 4650 512MB
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	87	Deceptively simple and easy to learn while including some interesting design choices that greatly expand the strategy elements. Shame that the content offered is a bit thin - a lot is hanging on the promise to offer free content updates.
Graphics	93	At maximum settings Demigod looks very good - animation and combat effects are exceptionally beautiful. Art is consistent and done without obvious shortcuts.
Audio	85	Competent audio, save the annoying unit acknowledgment unit voices and effects that get repetitive in record time.
Technology	80	The game engine is polished and scales surprisingly well - there is something to render even for high end cards while the game also runs on fairly old systems using gracefully cut down visuals. NAT traversal problems and network code issues are unforgivable for a multiplayer-oriented game.

OVERALL

Demigod is an action-RTS hybrid influenced by a popular Warcraft III mod (DotA), offering a fresh and interesting twist on the RTS gameplay. Polished, visually impressive and offering a surprising amount of depth under the deceptively simple gameplay. On the downside, Demigod suffers from major multiplayer connectivity issues and lack of content at launch - a lot is riding on patches and free content updates appearing as promised.

If you would like to comment on this review or discuss the game further, please head over to our discussion board - please click here (registration not required).