Smooth Controls, Excellent Graphics and a Dark Setting Cannot Save this Game. Dementium is Beyond Help.
Dementium starts out as any appropriate FPS does: you begin as a faceless nameless Caucasian who in this case is a hospital patient who discovers the hospital has been ransacked by the living dead and that any other living survivors are quick to become one of the many blood smears on the floors and walls.
The controls to Dementium actually aren't bad. The initial control layout is well designed as movement and attack are all in one section of the DS, meaning you won't have to do any multi-tasking or reaching over for a life-saving button that leads to your doom. Combat and vertical directions are all stationed on the left side of the screen while you look using the stylus. The game plays a little like a Survival-Horror game as you're set on a mostly linear path through a variety of dark and terrifying areas running into the occasional memos, maps and puzzles. However, it seems that the label of 'Survival Horror' - a combination of 20% action game, 30% adventure game and 50% atmospheric terror - is apparently detrimental to game developers minds and the game makes every effort to convey their thoughts:
The combat is all right as there's good hit detection for the enemies and firing, though the melee combat with the Nightstick is rather hit and miss and the swing is always just a little off. This would add a little to the horror aspect, but less than halfway through the game they immediately give you the final and only other melee weapon in the game that can kill enemies in two seconds. You also lack an inventory, so rather than collecting useful items to use later, you just absorb them if you need them. And then there's the puzzles...
You start off with a two page notebook that you can scribble on using the stylus which you can use for writing particular tasks or clues and you can access it during puzzle sections. It's a unique feature and it would be very helpful for the puzzles, but considering how insultingly easy each puzzle is it's almost not worth it. There wasn't a single puzzle I encountered that I hadn't memorized the numbers to all ready or needed to jot down notes for because every puzzle solution is set one to three rooms away from the actual puzzle!
I'm serious, the puzzles in Dementium couldn't stump a four year old! The final puzzle of the game stood out to me as wasted potential for a mind teaser: you were supposed to unlock a box using a four letter password, but the only clue were four numbers carved into a door that represented each letter. Before I even started solving the riddle, I read a memo next to the locked box that gave me the last part of the solution all ready. From there I instantly started guessing possible words ending with that letter and solved the puzzle in four tries.
You get a lot of control over the sound options which is something I appreciate a lot in games. You have the option of turning off the mildly annoying sound of your heartbeat (something that I wanted to do long ago in Illbleed) as well as ambience and actual music control. The soundtrack to Dementium starts off very well with a mood setting piano playing through most of the game, but beyond the Title and Load Screen, the piano and other tones such as tings from a child-like chime just felt completely over-played. The boss themes in particular are all quite stupid as they sound like they came from a circus organ.
The sound effects in the game are very unique and fit the setting and enemies well, though they occasionally wear on the atmosphere. On one occasion, I got swamped by these super creepy worm creatures that make a terrifying high pitched noise when they approach you, but considering how many of them there were, the otherwise creepy noise went stereo and just drowned my ears. Then there are those inexplicable and obnoxious screaming head monsters who scream every time they move making it sound like mobile Junior College haunted houses.
Speaking of which, some of the monster designs in this game do nothing but kill the atmosphere. The aforementioned screaming heads are some of the worst, though the eye-gouged zombies that waddle up to you were quite laughable as well. But then there are the bosses: The first one is kind of scary at first except for his constant sighing with every step and the fact that he has a squirt gun mounted to his arm. The second boss however literally destroyed the atmosphere for me because he is - I $#!t you not - a cackling, wheelchair-bound zombie wearing a gas mask armed with gas grenades and a gatling gun mounted to his arm.
Are you ****ing kidding?! I've seen enemies in Doom scarier than this! All they need to do is throw in a wrinkled dwarf Bond villain antagonist dressed up as a European General to make this a 100%, laugh-inducing, immature man-child attracting $#!t-fest.
Something that bugs me about Dementium and a lot of FPS' in general is that you never have the option to hold more bullets than you should. You only hold 24 bullets for your pistol, a measly 16 rounds for your shotgun and you can't store extra health pills so you don't have to hunt for them again. Admittedly I can't complain in this case because the hero is down to a pair of pants and a shirt or maybe even a hospital gown, but having to go back for healing items and ammo just to survive felt tiresome and laborious for the following reason which is the absolute worst part about Dementium:
The key factor that wears Dementium down in gameplay, atmosphere and in general is the fact that practically every enemy re-spawns per area. There's a good reason why most Horror games with an atmosphere don't have this attribute because it's one of many flaws that eats away at the player's incentive to play. Imagine playing Silent Hill 3 and facing up against its nigh invulnerable enemies in a single room, where there just happens to be a locked door there: after beating those enemies and discovering the door is locked, you have to go back and get the key, but once you return there, the enemies you killed have suddenly reappeared and you have to fight through them all again just to progress. This happens ALL THE TIME in Dementium for 90% of the rooms containing enemies. This means that any health or ammunition you intend to pick up later when you'll need it and the hallways leading to them will be heavily guarded by enemies you killed five minutes ago!
Worse yet is the very broken save system in the game. Every time you open a door, the game is automatically saved. I don't mean a new door... EVERY DOOR. Imagine playing the game where you see health and ammo lying in a tight corner. You do the sensible thing by thinking "I'll save those for later! There may be monsters up ahead and I'll need it for when I kill them and am low on health and ammo!"
So you go forward: Game saves. The next room happens to be a corridor filled with monsters. You fight through them, get injured in the process and go back to get the health and ammo. Game saves. You replenish your goods and begin to proceed: Game saves and the enemies re-spawn. Wash, rinse, repeat, desperately avoid pressing the POWER button.
Okay, so it makes you more vulnerable for a horror experience, but you know what else would make you more vulnerable? Having a low health meter that gets whittled down to zero with three hits. Having a sucky melee weapon. Facing tough enemies and cheap bosses. All three of which Dementium all ready has! This is clearly a problem in going too far to be something the game clearly isn't!! Your only hope is to get every health item and ammo box you run into and completely ignore anything else you can't absorb and just move on and hope there's more in the next room which isn't a good strategy to begin with.
You know what the worst part about all this is? Every time you die, you have to restart the chapter you died on from the beginning. You can't avoid it. The second the hero dies, the game instantly erases your recent save and you have to do the whole thing over again.
Dementium is amazing in only how often and how hard it bites its own tail: one second it's scary as Hell, the next ten minutes it's embarrassingly laughable and simultaneously infuriating. The hectic and terror-inducing combat is crippled by horrible game and monster design. It's one of the most anti-immersive games I've ever played. I'd hate to say it, but Demenitum is the most similar to, but actually worse than, Resident Evil Survivor. At least in Survivor you had an inventory screen, alternate paths and a good soundtrack. The entire game isn't worth learning the truth behind the story in that final, 40 second long ending; by the time I got to the final boss fight and the phenomenally long time it took for me to get to him, I realized that no such ending was worth such punishment. The Ward could've ended with an old pitch black CONGRATULATIONS screen and it still wouldn't have done it any justice. The game should have ended seconds after the design document was read; Dementium is far from complete, far from scary, far from compelling and far from fun.