"Sadly, this game suffers from repetition."

Intro When I first heard about Dementium: The Ward about a month ago, I was thrilled. I wasn't expecting much, but after seeing some trailers, I had to pretty much agree with everyone else that the game looked horrifying. Bloodstained walls, creepy music, and mutated slugs crawing after you making baby-like screams, all set in a massive, delapilated hospital. When the game released, I went out and got it as soon as I could. Sadly, it just didn't quite live up to the hype...

Story: 2/10 The main reason the story gets a 2 is because...there is essentially very little story to begin with, which was one of my major disappointments. The following contains spoilers. As soon as you begin the game, you find yourself in a wheelchair or on a stretcher or something, being rushed down a hall very quickly. On your way down, you notice zombie-like monsters and a creepy little girl watching you through a doorway. Soon the screen blacks out, and you wake with a gasp in a dark room. You get off the bed, and find a key to the room's door on the floor, along with a note that says "Why did you do it?". Okay, starts strong. But then...well, the story basically becomes almost non-existant until very late in the game, where you see a TV broadcast revealing an extra detail or two about what's happening; Apparently your character killed his wife. Then after you complete the game, you are shown a scene where a mad doctor is apparently messing around with your character's brain, leading the player to believe it all took place in his head, and was perhaps inserted into his head by the doctor. He then pulls out a knife and says "Time for phase 2", then the game ends.

Sound: 8/10 Now this is where the game shines; The sound. The developers did an exellent job of creating a tense atmosphere. Every monster has a sound you will come to recognize, which clues you in to what you're about to face. The near-constant thundering adds tension, and the music, sometimes creepy, and sometimes depressing, also adds greatly to the atmosphere. The guns sound ok too, and it even has the alarm from 007: Goldeneye near the start. Unfortunatly, the voices are sometimes hard to understand, especially the intercom near the start(You have to press your DS against your ear to understand it) The little girl's occasional crying and random babbling as you wonder the halls is pulled off nicely, however.

Graphics: 9/10 Now the graphics are amazing. I don't think any DS FPS Game(not that there are that many...) has had graphics as good as this since Metroid Prime: Hunters. I personally think it looks even better, but maybe that's because since MPH had such bright visuals, it exposed the pixelation easily. Not to say Dementium is without pixelation, it's everywhere. It's just not as noticable since it's so dark. The lighting in this game is also amazing. Sometimes when you are in an area with windows, and you don't have your light on, lightning will flash. The room will illuminate for around 2 seconds, then quickly fade back to dark. And if you look, you can actually see the light fade and grew dimmer. Almost every room is covered in blood, although you will eventually get used to this after seeing it so much, and it'll become far less atmospheric. The enemy models are very nicely done, and they move in a fluid manner as well, which is good.

Gameplay: 5/10 Well, here we are, the big hitter. As I said in the story part, you start in a dark room and immediatly find a key and a notepad. Now, this notepad can be used like Hotel Dusk: Room 215(Good game if you like text-driven mystery games) in the sense that you can write or draw anything you want onto it using the stylus. This is helpful if you are not good at memorizing door codes or something.

At first you are unarmed, but you soon find a baton, flashlight, and pistol, three of your earliest weapons. The game starts off with a very strong atmosphere, and it gives you that "What could be around that next corner?" feeling, accompanied with a chill down the spine. Unfortunatly, it soon becomes all too familiar, and all too predictable. Once you learn to recognize enemy sounds, it becomes pretty obvious what's waiting around the corner. And what's worse is how linear it all is. Probably one of the biggest problems with this game is the linearity. After the seemingly creative fist 3 chapters, it soon boils down to "Run through that bloody hall. Go through that door at the end into a room with beds and 3 or 4 doors. Only 1 door works, just take it into another blood covered hall with a zombie and a few closet-like side rooms with ammo, follow it until you reach a blockaid made of cabinets and tables, then backtrack and find some completely obvious door you somehow missed that leads you into a room with mutant slugs, which in turn leads to yet another bloody hall with a zombie hiding in a little side-closet, who's heavy breathing completely alerts you to it's presence".

...Yeah, besically, that's what you do until the end of the game, with very, very little story in between. The game has a total of 16 Chapters, and the vast majority of them play just like what I described above. There are also bosses, but they are pretty lame for the most part, save for one which did creep me out a bit(I'll list them, so SPOILER ALERT)

So for our first boss, we have The Cleaver, a large flabby monster that looks like it came right out of Doom 3. It basically just runs after you with a cleaver, and all you have to do to kill it is keep your distance and blast it's head with a shotgun a few times. The second boss is even worse. It's basically a guy in a wheelchair with a gatling gun built into his arm. You basically just hide behind a wall and listen to him shoot and fire away at nothing, and then run out and blast him when you hear him reloading. Next, we have probably the scariest "boss" in the whole game: The Mutant Slug Nest. You are trapped in a large slimy green room with 16-20 large, circular, toothy mouths in the walls that constantly spit out mutant slugs. To win, you have to destroy all the mouths, but this is easily one of the most frustrating bosses in the whole game, due to those screaming slugs. Normally they are weak and easy, but in this case they are a major nuisance. There is NO END to them, and if you turn around to kill a few of them, it may look like you're in the clear for 3 seconds, but then you'll hear "Eaaahh! Eaaaah!", and they'll be trying to bite at your ass again. And it takes quite a bit of time and ammo to destroy all the mouths, so diverting all your attention to the slugs is a bad idea. So it's best just to run from them and make circles around while blasting all the mouths with a shotgun or buzz-sawing them. But more than likely you'll still get hit by the little freaks when you try to turn a corner, and while they only cause 1 damage each hit, it adds up quickly, and you can only take a maximum of 10 hits(and that's if you entered with full health) It took me somewhere around 5 tries to win at this fight, and while that doesn't sound bad, it is. I'll get to that in a moment. Anyway, the next two bosses are actually just even lamer versions of the first two, and the sixth and final boss is a horrible cheapskate who can kill you in 5 moves, after a fairly lengthy final chapter.

Now, another major flaw of this game is the save system. You want to know why the third boss(and any boss really) is so annoying? It's because if you die anywhere in a chapter, you have to play the chapter again from the start. This means every time you die to a boss, you'll have to trudge back through the linear hallways doing the same boring stuff as before, only to get destroyed by the boss time and time again until you either get lucky, or figure out a good strategy. The game "saves" after every room, but this is apparently only used for when you load a game. EX: If you quit your game and then re-loaded, you would start at that save point. Of course, this is fairly useless, since you can easily close the DS and put it into sleep mode when you need a break.

The game is also very, very short. You could probably speed run it in an hour or two, and even playing casually, it only lasts for around 5 or 6 hours. It will start to seem that they only made the save system the way it is in an attempt to artificially lengthen the game, by forcing you to reply full chapters when you die. Which is cheap. There are a few puzzles here and there as well, but nothing major. Just 3 or 4 little riddles where you figure out a word or number code for a door or box.

Overall:5/10 Dementium: The Ward starts off strong and creepy, yet as it progresses, the wallpaper peels off to reveal what the game really is after the 5th chapter: Just a linear dungeon crawler that uses cheap tactics to cover it's short length, complete with lame bosses and all. And the fact that NOTHING is unlocked after completion, and the fact that there is virtually no replay value, makes it pretty hard to do a second play. It's just one of those games where once it's completed, you just don't want any more to do with it. It's not a bad attempt at all, it was a good first step for an original horror game on the DS, but it needed vast improvements. If there is ever a Dementium 2, lets hope they give it an actuall storyline and less linear, Resident Evil or Silent Hill like locations.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/05/07

Game Release: Dementium: The Ward (US, 10/26/07)