A mature handheld game, indeed!

User Rating: 8.5 | Dementium: The Ward DS
Right from the start the message "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore" lures the attention, something tells you that what you're about to go in is no picnic in the park, and it is surely not!

The game is very violent, right from the star you'll find yourself in a very hostile place, a hospital, dark and tenebrous. Soon enough you'll get yourself a flashlight, which helps a lot, because it's pretty dark without it, there's blood everywhere! I mean there's absolutely no place in the entire hospital where you'll encounter a light bloodless room, it's all disturbingly destroyed, chaotic atmospheric madness!

The game is divided in chapters, and it's not bad, there's 16 of them and the aspects of the rooms you find in the first one, are the same you'll find in the last ones, the rooms are different, with different ways and things to do, but the patterns are the same, they could've changed, even slightly, the patterns throughout the game, but that's ok, since you'll hardly think about it.

Lots of weapons can be found during the game, and they're the usual weapons you would find in a game like this, first a melee weapon, then handgun, shotgun, machine gun, magnum and so on, the design of the weapons are pretty good.

The game mechanics are from a first person game, you'll control the character movements with the d-pad, and the sighting with the stylus, works perfectly well. There's not much variety of enemies in the game, zombies are a must have, as well as some others creepy looking beasts, huge or small, all here!

The game can be considered easy, there's some intriguingly challenging puzzles, but the problem is that there's just too few of them, it's not even a puzzle per chapter, some chapters don't even have one, then you'll be riding through rooms, killing enemies and trying to find which door you are or not able to open, fun nonetheless.

The sound was nicely made, but to extract the best of it, you absolutely need a headphone, no discussion, it sets a pretty good link with the disorder of the place, creating an even better atmosphere!

The bad aspects are the game length, it lasted mere 4 hours for me, the paucity of puzzles and the high repetition of graphics patterns, still a great game though.

There you go, you have blood, gore, mutilation, chaos, torture, violence, strange creepy blood-seeking creatures and zombies, everything in a handheld Nintendo console, if you're after some game without the stereotype of a "kid" game, what more could you ask for?