"A Dungeons & Dragons *ACTION* Game? You're Kidding? Interesting, but Sadly, the Lazy Developers of Today Have Struck Again!"

So I see this game come out a while back. It's 30 bucks at release. Generally speaking, unless it's an Adventure game or some less popular genre (not knocking adventure games, I grew up with King's Quest and Space Quest games), the game will be 40-50 bucks. Thus, I kinda knew something was "up" with the game. When I finally found it a week ago for 10 bucks, I picked it up, figuring there wasn't really much to lose for so little money. I popped it in and gave it a spin and here's what I thought.

(Side Note: I've changed my scoring system in an attempt to be more accurate in my judgments. I hope this makes your decision of whether or not to get or play the game a bit easier and clearer.)

GRAPHICS: 2/5

This is pretty much a "gimme," yet they blew it. Graphics are a pain to make and cost a good deal of labor hours to refine, but all in all, make a commercial and splash some fancy images on the screen and people will buy the game no matter how bad it is. Apparently the developers of Demon Stone didn't realize this as they went ahead and made a game with shockingly poor graphics. No, this is NOT my system, either. I have nearly DOUBLE the minimum specs for the game and it still looks poor.

The only thing in the game that looks any good is some of the distant scenery and the important characters. They are very nice to look at and have a decent amount of detail put into them. Everything else seems rather sloppy and hastily done as if to make a game quickly with little care. This was a huge disappointment. Nevertheless, there are very few points to lose on graphics in my reviews, as I don't care about them as much as I do everything else.

MUSIC: 7/10

Not half bad! Everything has that epic, Lord of the Rings booming fantasy adventure music. None of the songs really stuck out. I caught myself humming along while in a level, but once finishing it, it became lost for good in my mind. It would've been better if they'd focused on making each song "wonderful," rather than above average, but this was definitely nice. Unfortunately, every song having the same "feel" for the most part, except for a couple of instances, really took away from the overall mood of the game.

SOUND: 8/10

The sounds are what you'd expect. Sword-clinking, fire-ball hurling, and war-cries. Nothing terribly special, but they work quite well.

As for the voices, they worked. However, they threw a cheap shot and busted out Patrick Stewart...yeah...Jean Luc Picard. @_@ They got out the big guns! =p It would seem that Patrick Stewart is quickly becoming to the gaming and anime community what Dean Cain became to the movie industry about three years ago: a has-been who will do any movie/game for money. This is typically known as a prostitute. Nevertheless, unlike Dean Cain, Patrick Stewart actually has real talent, and it shows in his vocal performance in Demon Stone.

STORY: 5/15

Not too shabby, but definitely lacking a lot. The characters can frequently say things that don't sound one bit "medieval," but a tad too present day to come off as "realistic" in their setting.

Essentially, you are a group of three people with superior skills existing in the Forgotten Realms, which is the Dungeons & Dragons standard gaming zone for crap to happen. As you'd expect...crap happens. A tough wizard sealed up two warring "demons" (they're actually races from other dimensions) inside a stone called...you guessed it; the Demon Stone. You wind up botching things up and unsealing the demons. Big surprise. Not like I didn't see that one coming. Being the typical selfless heroes that we've been spoon-fed since gaming began, our beloved characters must travel through a pre-set path that you cannot deviate from (aside from VERY rare instances of a treasure chest sitting up on a ledge; wow, that's freedom of movement), while not giving off any impression that there's more of a world than the battlegrounds that they travel through.

Of course, they must fight monsters such as orcs, goblins, snake men, "demons," etc., which is essentially ALL you do in the game, but I'll save the "fun" of the fights for the gameplay section. As for the plot and Dungeons & Dragons references, the game has one huge fault: the Sorcerer, while nowhere near as skilled as the Fighter or the Rogue, is actually capable of fighting off high-level monsters...with a staff. Despite this game being made by the people who made The Two Towers game, your character in this is NOT Gandalf. This is Dungeons & Dragons, not Lord of the Rings. Imagine if Gandalf could cast Time Stop in the movies. It would look cool, but would be a travesty in terms of remaining true to the roots of the series. This was a terrible idea.

To very very slightly counter that, they changed the spells such as Burning Hands and a few of the other "touch" spells into melee attacks that give negative status conditions. These were very innovative. While not true to the genre, since you're technically supposed to rest after using a spell X amount of times, it was a good adaptation for a far more action-based version of the world. Still...Dungeons & Dragons pure Wizards should NOT be able to freaking melee without changing forms or any of that sort of thing.

To say something truly positive, and probably the only TRUE good plot element in the game, is that the characters all explain their back-stories, which are well-developed (the Drow Rogue in particular) and intriguing. Unfortunately, the Fighter and the Sorcerer only divulge their stories very briefly and don't go into as much detail as was necessary to fully grasp "who they were."

GAMEPLAY: 5/20

Sadly, the "heart" of the game; whether it's fun or not, just didn't come through. Fighting hordes of enemies CAN be fun. Unfortunately, having already played the last two Lord of the Rings movie games, there was nothing left more me here. The only "new" thing was all of the magic you could obtain. Unfortunately, you could only have one projectile spell at a time, each previous spell being replaced by the new one. Apparently elemental resistances and whatnot just didn't matter enough to the developers.

Basically, there are two things you do in this game as far as playing is concerned. The first thing you do is fight through ridiculously large hordes of enemies, moving along until you reach an "event" or the second gameplay type. Three moderately powerful people in the Forgotten Realms could never DREAM of taking on this insane number of enemies; more on that in a moment, though.

The second and only other thing you do as far as playing goes is a bar-filling/emptying event. You're either breaking down a door, protecting a door, stopping enemies from getting close to something, fighting a strong monster, or protecting an ally. It sounds massively varied but it all oozes together in one, bit, indiscernible mess of boring fighting. During at least 60% of these events, there are ENDLESS enemies. I could fight for five minutes and kill the boss of an area and magically the enemies stop coming; OR I can fight for an hour, killing an army of enemies, and then kill that same boss. It doesn't matter. When the leader dies, I suppose not only morale disappears, but also the enemies themselves, COMPLETELY. Surely you would fight the four or five monsters currently attacking you? @_@ That's one other thing...in the Forgotten Realms...even in an action version, killing that many enemies is once again a head-shakingly silly occurrence. Aside from god-like characters, no one can do what the three people in this game do.

Also, the fighting itself is quite boring. You can perform various combos and have melee as well as ranged attacks. Sound cool? It's not. The melee fighting is sucky in that the combos are mostly worthless. As I recall, two were pretty decent during the entire course of the game...one of those two was "Left-Click Left-Click-Left-Click." How original and fun to perform. O_o That isn't even a combo! It's just doing the normal attack over and over! @_@ The ranged attacks, aside from the Sorcerer's are nearly useless. The weapons would OCCASIONALLY do one-hit kills, but it took a good three or so seconds to pull the weapon out, draw it back, and throw it; ample time for about 3 orcish enemies to lay you out flat on your back and wail on you.

The actual health system in the game was garbage as well. Some battles, health will pop up all over the place, while in others, you have to switch from character to character whenever the one you were playing is about to die (apparently they CANNOT die if you aren't controlling them), meaning I would finish most levels with slithers of health after having to retry some of the fights a couple of times.

Finally, this wasn't the "playing" of the game, but it was a huge feature that I have to mention. This is the only place it really fits in best in my review. Whenever you beat a level (there are 10-12 levels), you get to spend the experience you earn and the gold you acquire. Unfortunately, as you play, they don't tell how much XP each enemy is worth. There isn't a counter or anything until after the level, and it still doesn't explain how it works. I've killed well over a thousand enemies in a few of the levels and got HORRIBLE experience.

By the end of the game, I was unable to upgrade everything and was getting my butt kicked by the final boss. Since the game has an RPG element of letting you upgrade your equipment and spells and whatnot, I assumed that I could play through an earlier level and get some more experience. Guess what? You can't. So it's an Action-RPG where you can't go back and kill stuff or change your stats around if the game gets too hard. Wow. How...pathetic. It wouldn't have cost them a thing to change this. It would make the game less challenging, but if it makes me have *FUN*, then holy crap, DO IT! Developers seem to care less and less about the gamers who play their games. All that matters is making a quick buck and getting funding to make another poorly done game.

Upon beating the game, you will still be unable to play through the previous levels for any sort of XP or monetary gain to your party. In other words, once you beat the game, there's no reason to play again. Had they followed a Diablo/Dungeon Siege approach of letting you fight through the hordes again to attain more power to better handle hard moments in the game, it would've been more fun. Also, had they followed the Diablo/Dungeon Siege approach of letting you go back through the game with your old characters at a higher difficulty, letting you become even MORE powerful, then it would've been really neat!

And finally...where the HELL is multiplayer? This game IS a multiplayer game that didn't get multiplayer support. I cannot imagine why you wouldn't make this game multiplayer. This game, if it followed my above two statements about what would improve the game, would be REALLY cool, despite a crummy story if it also included multiplayer.

This would be the fun alternative for people who are too mind-boggled by the light-weight number-crunching and rule-obsessing of pure Dungeons & Dragons. I've been intrigued with the Forgotten Realms and spend a lot of times worrying about the rules and trying to create superb characters, ending up deleting them all the time (Neverwinter Nights/KotOR), and would appreciate a fun break from that stress, even though the rules do present a fun challenge. However, due to the developers being lazy (and likely a lack of funding due most likely to some hyped game they were making at the time (just saying, I haven't researched it, but that's how these things work), this game went from pure potential to pure disappointment.

FINAL SCORE: 27/60=45%=5 (rounded up)

THE VERDICT: Buy cheap, borrow, or play LotR games.

This game is not vey good. It's fairly crummy, but it has its moments. It's not agonizingly awful or tedious (not tedious ALL the time), but enough to anger you. I would never get it for full price (30 dollars), but if you can find it for 10 dollars or less, like I did, and you have a space 10 dollars that you just don't mind burning for under eight hours of gaming and just to sate your own curiosity, then by all means, buy it. It's nothing special, but it is "interesting" and worth playing. If a friend has it, see if you can borrow it or play it at their house.

Also, if you've played the Lord of the Rings Two Towers or Return of the King games, you've pretty much played this. Aside from the story, which isn't too impressive in the first place, you'll get most of the same type of thing out of those games that you will out of Demon Stone. In fact, I believe the RotK game came out BEFORE Demon Stone, and yet it has co-op! How's that for a smack in the face?

So, in closing, the game's worth playing, but don't go out of your way to play it or anything. If you're a big D&D fan, chances are some of the action-adapted elements of the game will drive you nuts. If you're not into D&D, you may have no clue as to what the heck is going on. Thus, get it or don't, but don't lose any sleep over it. Thanks for reading, and I hope this has helped! =)

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/05