December 14th, 2007 by AlmightyMax
At least there's shooting
So, as a horror game, Dementium is a flop. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s a fairly average first-person shooter that does nothing to distinguish itself. If you’ve played Metroid Prime Hunters, the experience isn’t all that different; except for the flashlight ripped straight from Doom 3. Just like in Doom, you get a flashlight with inexplicably infinite power which you’ll use to light up the dark hallways. This would be a decent gameplay addition, but it suffers from the same handicap as it did in Doom 3; you can’t wield a flashlight and a gun at the same time. This means you may spot an enemy in the hall in front of you, but when you take out your gun you can’t see it and - even though you’re aiming right at it - you can’t shoot it. Almost all the game’s gunplay takes place in confined spaces which doesn’t really make much sense.
Once in a while the game remembers it’s supposed to be a survival horror game and sends you ‘adventuring’, although that seldom amounts to more than some stupid fetch quest. You may have to count the dead people in the morgue, or find keys to open a chest. Either way it amounts to the same thing: lots and lots of backtracking. It’s hard enough to figure out how to move forward; not only are the hallways so drab you can’t tell which way you came, but pretty much every map you find is worthless. The maps fail to show obstructions which are found at nearly every junction, and since you can’t draw on the map a la Phantom Hourglass, you’ll guessing which way you need to go back and often frustrating you when you realize you’re being blocked by something as flimsy as an overturned wheelchair.
Broken wreck
There’s numerous other issues that hold Dementium back. For instance, the absolutely broken save system. The game auto-saves for you every time you enter a room, which is nice, but when you die you start back from the beginning of the chapter. This can be quite annoying when you’re on one of those chapters with the ridiculous fetch quests, and it makes the entire game rather tedious to play. Also notable is the lack of any sort of multiplayer. We’ve seen how great online FPS work on the DS, so why not include it in Dementium as well? With the weird lighting from the flashlights, it could be the next big thing on Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection. Now, there’s absolutely no reason to replay the game at all.
A disappointment
Overall, Dementium: The Ward comes as a disappointment. I was not expecting huge things from the game, but I thought I’d get at least a fun FPS that’d take my attention off Metroid Prime for a while. Admittedly, the game has its moments near the end, but they are outweighed by the sheer number of unsavory moments you’ll have to experience while getting there.
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