Dementium: The Ward Review
Dementium: The Ward is a visually good game (as far as DS games are concerned at least), and it has neat controls. The levels, however, while not linear, are repetitive, as you see almost the exact same floor scheme on every floor. The game progresses by switching between two hospital buildings, and you make your way down to the bottom floor. I'm not sure exactly which building you start in, but it's something like this: 7th floor East Building, 7th floor West Building, 6th floor West Building, 6th floor East Building. Each side is a level. Each west side floor and east side floor is nearly identical to the floor right below it, providing the player with few surprises past the first few levels.
The game does provide some interesting puzzles, but there really aren't enough to call it a puzzle game.
Enemy AI is extremely poor, and monster locations are rarely surprising. Mindless monsters approach you, and you can always hear a monster when you're nearby it. Since nothing ever pops out at you, it's uncommon to ever feel scared in this game. Enemies do spawn in different locations of the room, however. There are a few times where you feel rushed to run, which can be scary to certain people, but that's about all the adrenaline that will every be pumping through your body, unfortunately, unless you are extremely faint of heart. The monster design is pretty good, however, regardless of their substandard AI.
The music is pretty good in my opinion, though. It's very spooky, and creates a certain tension while playing. The music is much scarier than any of the monsters are though.
Saving is interesting also. It saves upon entering every single room, so you can just shut off the DS whenever you want to, but if you die, you have to start back from the beginning of the level. It instantly saves your death the moment you die, so you can't just shut off the game after that and expect to be back where you were. This can be annoying, but the game is short enough as it is without it though, and you can just shut off the game when you're getting low on health and monsters are closing in on you. Taking all things into consideration, I'm rather indifferent to the saving process.
Another thing is the weapon system. There are a nice variety of weapons, but if you manage to get the buzz saw in the game (you don't actually have to get any guns... they only appear once in the game and if you accidentally miss one, the game just says "too bad") that's all you need for much of the game. Enemies don't get much stronger as the game progresses (except the bosses) so if you're just using the buzz saw, you can kill almost all monsters, except the bosses, and sometimes you can kill the bosses with it too. It doesn't even require any batteries or ammo or anything... you just hack away. It's basically a cheap version of the Doom chainsaw.
Hopefully when Dementium II comes out, it will have: non-repeating floor schemes, more puzzles, better enemy AI, better enemy spawning locations, better overall scares, an improved the save system a bit, and it will make weapon use more strategic and more original.
So ultimately it's a neat game and it IS fun to play through, but if you're looking for a game to really scare you, this game isn't for you. It you can get it for cheap, go ahead and purchase it though. While it's not too great of a same, it is a real benchmark for the Nintendo DS.
Thank you.Read full review
