REVIEW: Demon Gaze

As you wander around the labyrinths, you will find many floor traps. I mean, after all, what’s a first-person dungeon crawler without a variety of floor traps? After playing this game, I can safely say I hate one-way floors — they are bane of my existence on this planet. Though some of the traps are annoying, most of the maps are pretty straightforward. My only real complaint here is that some quests will have events in dungeons which will take you back to the inn, and you will have to backtrack to where you were. This happens more often than it should. There are a few puzzles to figure out along the way, though most of these are pretty simple. Kicking walls may reveal hidden doors or treasure. You can also equip a certain demon to help you find these. One interesting thing they did was the inclusion of treasure maps. These maps will include a hint to a location and an X,Y coordinate to find it on the map. If you have the proper demon equipped — which will also be hinted at on the treasure map — and kick the wall there, you will get a nice treasure.

There are just a couple other things I would like to touch on in regards to gameplay. The first being that there is a note system, much like the system found in Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls. You can get some magic chalk and leave Gazer notes for other players that connect to PSN to find. You can also upgrade your equipment via the Ether Machine in the basement of the inn. This is actually pretty simple. You break down your equipment for ether, and use it to upgrade other equipment. A few things to keep in mind here are, on the equipment stats screen, the equipment is graded, as you can get A-ranked stuff that is better the C-ranked. This kind of gives you an idea of how much a piece of equipment can be upgraded. Another thing to keep in mind while doing this is, when you break something down, ether doesn’t go into one pool. For example, if you break down a hat, you get Hat Ether to upgrade other hats. If it is sword, you get Sword Ether you can use to upgrade swords. You will also want to note the special properties of an item before breaking it down. Something may have great properties and lower stats, but still be useful. There is enough customization here to keep veteran busy for a long time, but simple enough for a beginner to jump right in.

At the end of the day, I would have to say Demon Gaze is pretty fun despite the few flaws it has. It is very welcoming to beginners, but with enough depth to keep those seeking a challenge happy, thanks to five different difficulty settings. On the normal setting it took around 40 hours to complete the main quest. The artwork is simply amazing — you really need to see this game on the Vita’s OLED screen to know how great it looks. If you are a fan of the genre, and looking for a great story and some fun fast combat, you’ll find this one well worth its $39.99 price tag, but if you’re not a fan of grindy RPGs, you may want to pass this one by.