Dementium: The Ward

"While it may be a mix of Silent Hill and Doom, it manages to not be as fun as either."

Dementium: The Ward is exactly what it says it is on the box (and I paraphrase): a mix between Silent Hill and Doom. A rather unique game for the Nintendo DS, which doesn't have many first-person shooter games at all. Being a big fan of Silent Hill and having played Doom 3 recently, I decided to give it a go. Here's what you can expect from Dementium: The Ward.

Story: 5/10

The story in the game starts off very promising. You wake up in a bloody hospital with only a notepad and a light. The only thing on the notepad are the words "Why did you do it?". Hmm, so it sounds like you did something bad. From there you have to explore your surroundings while staying alive.

Now, most stories give you a bit more of an intro, but that's not the reason I don't really care for Dementium's story. The reason is that the story only really has 2-3 major points to it. These snippets of the story are spread out through the game's 16 chapters, so you'll go through many chapters in a row before getting any story at all. Most of the puzzles throughout the game have nothing to do with the story either. Overall, almost every other horror game I can thing of has a better story than Dementium does (It has the original DOOM beat, but just barely!). It's a shame, too, because I think they really could have expanded on the characters and made a decent story out of the game.

Gameplay: 6/10

The game, as stated before, is pretty much a mash-up of Silent Hill's environment and feel combined with Doom's style of combat (and occasionally the monsters seem to come out of nowhere similar to Doom). The controls are surprisingly tight, as you control where you look and aim with your stylus on screen. You can than fire with the "L" shoulder button and move around with your directional buttons, going forwards, backwards, and side to side. You can even dash forward and side to side as well, but not backwards. So I loved the controls, they made fighting easier and smooth. Changing weapons was a major pain, though, as you must touch which weapon you want from a display at the bottom of your screen. This can lead to some frustrating moments when you need to change weapons quickly when an enemy pops out. However, nothing is as frustrating as this game's save system. Whenever you die in a chapter, you must restart the entire chapter over. I found that you can sort-of skip around this by doing a "quit" which saves your game where you're at, but if you die after that, you'll restart the chapter. To avoid this you can turn your DS off before you die, but as you can see, no self respecting game would have you do this. So to summarize, Dementium has great controls, generic gameplay, and a horrible save system.

Graphics: 6/10

The graphics in Dementium look like they could easily be found on a Playstation game. Overall, the game looks pretty good, having some good 3D models and decent environments with plenty of stuff lying around. However, the environment is the same over and over and over. Every room looks like very other room (a mix of blandish/grey walls and blood). As I recall, you only really changed scenery 3-4 times throughout the game. Also, while I thought the enemies and bosses were well-designed, they are overused way too much. And not just the enemies were reused here, we're talking bosses! They have like 6 boss fights in this game, and they only have 4 different boss characters! That's right, they reused the boss characters....twice!

The few cut scenes in the game were pretty good, although their "normal human" look could use some work. These are too few and far between to be on any real consequence though, as just like the story, there's not enough of it.

Music / Sound Effects: 7/10

I did like the music in Dementium when it played, which was unfortunately hardly ever. The intro music did have a very, very catchy tune, though the rest of the music was easily forgettable. Even more memorable was the sound effects in the game, most of the enemies made many unique noises, and while this often gave their positions away, you did remember them. There were some horrible noises in there as well though, in fact one enemy sounded like a basket of kittens constantly meowing. Aww, how cute, right? No. ANNOYING! Overall, though, I feel that the music and sound effects are one of the most memorable parts in the game.

Re-playability: 5/10

It can actually take awhile to play through Dementium, though that is mostly due to not knowing exactly where you need to go, or by not wanting to go forward when there's an enemy or two in the way. As with most horror games, I found that running is often the fastest and easiest way to survive. Don't get me wrong, though, once you finally do beat the game, there is no reason to play through it again. No new weapons, items, and lord knows you don't want to hear the abysmal "story" again. So while it can take a while to get through, this is only because you really don't know where to go, not because you derive any fun playing through Dementium.

Overall: 6/10

Overall, I think Dementium was an almost-decent shot at making a survival horror on the DS. It's really one of your only options on this platform, though, not only in the horror genre, but in the FPS genre as well. If they could've had a greater variety of environments and enemies, as well as a re-worked save system, Dementium might not drive you crazy. As it is though, you have been warned! The good news is that you can probably pick Dementium up for fairly cheap. Either way, have fun and keep playing!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/03/08

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