Dementium II HD Review (PC)

Dementium II HD is the remastered edition of the popular Nintendo DS horror game, spruced up and released on the PC.

The 2010 release of the first-person survival horror video game was met with praise, having little competition on the Nintendo DS. It brought many improvements over its predecessor, from weapons and gameplay mechanics to the way the control interface worked.

Developer Memetic Games has now had the game published on Steam, and it's time to see how it fares against the stiff competition on the PC platform.

Story

Dementium II HD has players take on the role of William Redmoor, a man trapped in the clandestine “healing center” of Bright Dawn, after having suffered brain surgery meant to treat his recurring nightmares.

The surgery – evidently – didn't work, and now he finds himself trapped, fighting the nightmarish spawns once again, and trying to make sense of what happened and stop the Doctor once and for all.

The first game, Dementium: The Ward, hinted at the protagonist's madness taking over after he allegedly killed his wife in front of his daughter.

While it is unclear where the truth lies, the story would make for an interesting (if unoriginal) game, navigating the monstrous and horrific creations of the troubled mind while trying to piece it all together.

Gameplay

Unfortunately, the game misses its potential. Dementium II HD plays like a first-person shooter from the days when having a game was reason enough to justify playing it.

You start by navigating a prison-like facility and stab, bash and shoot either guards or hellspawns, using a flashlight to make your way through its basement and caves, and along the way you find yourself teleported to realms of madness where you usually have to kill a couple of zombies in order to return to reality.

The fact that the flashlight constantly flickers and you have to give it a friendly smash from time to time adds to the overall horror atmosphere that the developers were going for, but unfortunately it stays on when it's mounted to the shotgun, which detracts from it.

There is some variety to the weapons, as you have a knife, sledgehammer, guns and a flamethrower, but they all work rather badly. Aiming is difficult and very primitive, as you always feel like you have to pause for an instant in order to get the projectile to hit where you're aiming, and the recoil is ridiculous.

Also, weapon switching seems very laggy for no good reason, and you always have to run back when doing it because you can't just keep the mouse button pressed to have the weapon shoot when your character is done fiddling with it, you have to depress and click again.

This unfortunately makes for a very dull dynamic, where you can't wither a creep down with your pistol and then get more personal with the sledge, because it takes too long to switch and you have to click as if possessed in order to swing.

It also means that in some situations you're going to be frustrated by not being able to properly switch to melee once your gun is out of ammo, and you'll be stuck there, reloading like a ponce while the nasties get a piece of you.

Which is another problem, because you get stuck in character models a lot. It wouldn't seem so, but apparently a ghastly eviscerated fellow with stilts for legs stops you with the same impervious nonchalance that a concrete wall displays.

This often means not being able to run and recoup because you got slightly surrounded by two enemies, and it makes for some gimmicky situations where you go about combat in a certain way in order to circumvent the game's faults, not because of tactical reasons.

Add this to the fact that you'll be killing the same three critters over and over again, with the same battle music loop, in the same boring and uneventful manner, and the game's gloomy tone and attempts at presenting surreal environments quickly give way to the tediousness of going back and forth to unlock doors.

There are some nice moments in the game, the parallel dimensions are certainly interesting, being teleported to a nightmare realm of surreal visuals all of a sudden is a move with potential, but unfortunately wherever you find yourself, you go through the same motions.

You fight the boring monsters, which are not particularly dangerous apart from the fact that your sketchy movements make it hard to dodge and often times it's not exactly clear how and when they hit you, so you abandon that altogether and just maul them down.

Ammo is scarce, as is the horror game trope, but you just find bullets sitting around waiting for you in typical '94 Doom fashion most of the time, and using melee does not exactly entail the sense of danger it should, apart from the fact that you can't reliably dodge, so you'll get some health points deducted.

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Horror games usually have, or should have, some strings attached to using guns, like attracting unwanted attention or getting bitten when in melee range, diseased etc. Yet, in Dementium, it feels like there is no such intent for weapons, you just use what you have, most of the time hitting stuff with your mallet because it's cheap and it does decent enough damage.

It also has zero reloading time apart from the wind-up, a fact that is most important in playing the game, as dispatching the nightmare spawns quickly becomes a chore you don't want to spend more time than necessary on.

Also on the topic of time, the character walks very slowly and you'll be playing the game constantly running, which does not offer a dramatic increase in velocity but it's still better than the usual crawl.

This is yet another defect, as having a run key is useless when you're going to be always using it and wishing that the character would walk at that pace normally, and have a sprint and stamina type of mechanic for extra bursts.

There are only a handful of enemies, some of them being a bit more interesting like the ice wraith or the guys that teleport you to another dimension, but they quickly become annoying, rather than horrific, especially the ones that teleport you on touch.

There are also puzzles scattered around, most of them relating to getting an item from someplace else or finding a note with the required combination someplace else, making you backtrack once that is done in order to make the game seem a little bigger.

With no integration or explanation, they seem just as random as all the other parts that together make Dementium II HD. As is commonplace in horror games nowadays, you find various scribbles and notes lying around, offering more clues for your quest to make sense of the world around you.

But they are too short and too few, and do a poor job of conveying the kind of aura a horror game should convey. There are also animated cutscenes that get to jump on you from time to time, like turning a corner and seeing an eerie apparition, but their value soon fades when you are left with the same dreary job of hammering down two mindless brutes that you can't go around of because of hit boxes being too big, set to the same mind-wrenching combat music loop.

Boss fights are also quite trite, and whittling away with your shiv at some poor gruesome nightmarish creation's ankles is not quite what the horror is really about.

Sound and Graphics

This is an area that clearly does not warrant the “HD” moniker, as the music is rather uninspired and extremely repetitive, using the same loop over and over for combat, and rarely having some of the atmospheric and haunting noises expected in horror titles.

Sounds have pretty much the same production value, with some items sounding a lot louder than they should and others barely audible. Also, while jumping, the character makes a noise as if he's preparing to throw himself at the moon, with the result being of course not even close.

The graphics are outdated, to say the least, and seemingly the transition from a forgiving screen size and modest hardware performance to a big screen used to displaying detailed and powerful imagery does not bode well for Dementium II HD.

The visual effects are poor and monotonous most of the time, the character models have a very low quality and the textures are also sub-par. The fact that you get blood on your knife, hands and hammer does nothing to help the overall impression that this is an old game.

Some of the backdrops look a little better, not necessarily from a quality perspective, but rather from a mood standpoint, the color palettes used conveying a certain feeling of unease. But the general architecture is still very limited and feels stale overall.

It seems like all buildings are the same set height, like standard size building blocks were used for everything, from prison cells to houses and churches, but at least the low complexity makes the world easier to navigate using the game map, a system that has no accounting of height and levels.

The various monsters you'll encounter are very limited both in appearance and functionality, and the poorly executed and repetitive effects and backgrounds offer an overall unimpressive visual experience.

Conclusion