If you don’t read the musings of Shaun Musgrave around here, you’re doing yourself a disservice by missing out on all the awards he gives out for things. While the highly coveted Most Spider-Mans of the Week award seems to get doled out the most, today’s news is on the 2015 Golden Poncho award winner Demon’s Rise ($7.99). If you’re unfamiliar, Golden Ponchos are handed out for the best original RPG’s of the year, duh, and Demon’s Rise, as well as its sequel, Demon’s Rise 2: Lords of Chaos ($7.99) are great games. Shaun reviewed the original all the way back in 2015, mentioning that the game was lacking a bit of polish despite being an enjoyable experience with tons of replay value. Since then, the game has seen a lot of love from its developer, taking care of quite a few of the concerns laid out in the review.
In general, Demon’s Rise seems to believe in generous portions. The campaign runs 67 stages long, and the roster of enemies includes 50 different creatures ranging from small, relatively harmless ratmen to huge dragons. While most of the lower-level goons are only differentiated by their stats and whether or not they can use ranged attacks, as you progress through the game, you’ll encounter a wide variety of enemy behaviors. The game isn’t shy about throwing an impressive number of foes at you, either. One of the random patrol maps I came across put me in the middle of a fight between a giant scorpion and what must have been more than a dozen other enemies. I had to choose when and where to butt in to this particular affair, and watching this huge battle play out while I picked off scragglers certainly felt epic. Of course, enemies won’t usually be at each other’s throats, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to be the star of such massive battles. …Read More
The contrast between Demon’s Rise and its sequel is fascinating, as Demon’s Rise saw so many updates that the sequel really didn’t feel like the leap we typically see between two RPGs and instead just sort of felt like more Demon’s Rise. This is actually a good thing as Demon’s Rise was great, so more Demon’s Rise is even better. You can check out our review of the sequel as well, but I think a strong strategy is to grab the first one while it’s cheap and once you play through it, dive into the sequel.
In other Wave Light Games news, they’re hard at work on polishing up the release of their next big game, Strike Team Hydra. We expect to hear more on all that sometime next month.
