Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone Review at eToychest

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There's a new FR: Demon Stone review at eToychest, with the rating of 82%. Here's a clip:

The setting is the most apparent disparity between Demon Stone and Stormfront’s previous effort. Set solidly in the world of Forgotten Realms, and scripted by award-winning author R.A. Salvatore, Demon Stone will be instantly familiar to fans of the D&D universe. The game boasts a nearly encyclopedic repertoire of creatures ripped straight from the pages of a monster manual, and both the spell lists and locales will please fans with their accuracy. A few familiar faces also make appearances, including Salvatore’s most famous creation, the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden. The story itself is somewhat standard fare for this type of setting, centering around three bold adventurers who face off against insurmountable odds and dark wizards. It won’t net Salvatore any additional awards, but it is well scripted and enjoyable throughout. For a videogame, especially, it is more than sufficient.

From a gameplay standpoint, Demon Stone could not honestly be accused of any further novelty. It plays very similarly to Two Towers and other fantasy hack-and-slash games. Because this is a genre that Stormfront help to reinvent and revitalize in 2002, however, that is not a great crime. The gameplay in Stormfront’s previous title was very solid and it has been successfully tweaked and updated for Demon Stone. Essentially, players control a group of three adventurers—a fighter, a sorcerer and a rogue—through a series of fairly interactive environments. The camera takes a cinematic sky-eye view of the action while players switch at will between the three combatants, taking advantage of their individual strengths to overcome the incredible onslaught of enemies spewed forth by the game. Each warrior has a different skill focus, obviously: the fighter is adept at melee combat and devastating damage, the sorcerer is best when used for ranged magic attacks, and the rogue is very much focused on speed and stealth. Learning the strengths of these warriors becomes more important as the game progresses, as the button-mashing success of earlier levels begins to wane and more a directed strategy becomes necessary. The three adventurers each boast special attacks and can also join together for a larger team attack after filling a special meter. They gain experience at the end of each scenario and this experience can be used for the purchase of new skills and attacks. Again, it’s a familiar system, but it works very well. The number of powers available for purchase seems greatly increased over Two Towers, and the satisfaction of fleshing out each of the adventurers and finding an agreeable style of play has a nice feeling of reward. The three heroes also have a more natural balance between them than those seen in Stormfront’s previous effort, and swapping between them in the midst of heated battles can be quite invigorating.

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[ January 02, 2005, 17:32: Message edited by: chevalier ]