Din’s Curse: Demon War Review

Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers a Wot I Think review for Soldak’s Din’s Curse: Demon War, calling the entire action RPG package better than Torchlight.

And then a message popped up saying that Deepfang’s uprising of Hellhounds was complete, and he was starting another one. Not only was floor 6 now full of Hellhounds, but if somebody didn’t deal with them soon, they’d attack the town.

Town attacks are the purest example of Din’s Curse dynamism. Screw up, or just get a run of bad luck, and monsters will come bursting out of the ground to butcher as many townspeople as they can. It turns out that those incidental NPCs have a purpose after all- in an attack, they provide much-needed fodder before the monsters attempt to slaughter vital townsfolk, like vendors and people with a head on their shoulders (read: quest-givers). One lovely little feature is that you can actually give arms and armour to each and every member of the town, so if you’re in a particularly miserable community that’s forced to repel monster attacks at every turn, you can try and equip the townsfolk. What then do you do when you’re one dungeon level away from the big bad that’s organising these attacks, and you get the message that the town is under attack? Do you press on, or fall back?

It’s a beautiful system because it’s just so emotive. Each town is a self-contained story. On average, each one might only take 25 minutes to save, but as well as the dungeon tileset and quests being different for each one, you also get to select the parameters of the next town you go to. Tougher monsters, more active NPCs and more active monsters are all options, and the result is that each town takes on a life of its own.