You should play the Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked demo

Having had a great time with the dungeon-crawling digital board gaming of Demeo a few years ago, a sequel was naturally high on my wishlist. That it comes with a full D&D license, as opposed to featuring home brand versions of fantasy staples, just makes Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked all the more exciting.

OK, so the title’s a bit too much, but I can live with that.

At the heart of Battlemarked is the same style of digital board game adventuring as Demeo. This is a simplified riff on the genres that has you playing attack and ability cards with deterministic outputs, so long as the die rolls in your favour. Additionally, since this is now D&D flavoured, the dice might be 20-sided, but it’s labelled with simple attack markers on all sides, except for a single critical success (doubling damage) and critical failure (whiffing and potentially damaging allies instead).

The cards you have available to you depend on your character, and here we have a hearty bunch of classic D&D classes and races amongst the defined characters. Bolthrax Brightscale is your forthright Dragonborn Paladin, leading the way with his ability to regenerate armour points and soak up damage, allowing Ash the Tiefling Rogue to sneak and stab, while Jessix the Human Ranger marks her quarry and fires arrows from afar, and Tibby the Halfling Sorcerer can send spells of ice and fire to deal elemental damage. There’s two more characters for the full game, and all of them have specific core abilities that will be available all or most turns, and a menagerie of randomised class abilities that can become available to you down the line – Tibby could get a AOE Fireball, for example, Ash a teleporting stab attack that then shrouds her in stealth, and so on.

There’s a good mixture here, and they work well to compliment one another in battle. It’s an easy game to play, gradually revealing the board as you move through the dungeon, kick open doors, and find surprising hordes of enemy goblins, fungal mycopaths, rogue archers and spell-casters, and just swarms of rats. So many rats.

It can be particularly brutal, as each die bounces around on the 3D board scenery and hands down its judgment, with the traditional slew of good and bad luck that would be enough to see you enshrine or melt down your dice in real world D&D. And the randomised levels can be stuffed to the gills with a bunch of hulking trolls to battle one attempt, and more humble opponents on the next.

So far, so Demeo, but Battlemarked embraces the D&D through what’s wrapped around the core dungeon crawling. There’s more storytelling here, and the first of the demo’s two scenarios has one of those traditional D&D campaign openers, as your band of adventurers happens upon a Neverwinter nobleman in dire straits, as he’s attacked by a band of goblins. This wooded scene with a bridge crossing a stream makes for a nice battleground for a bitesized encounter, leading into an opener for the wider campaign narrative, as you’re then invited to escort the nobleman and a late-coming friend back to a tavern in Neverwinter.

You’re also presented with narrative moments, where you can roll actual D20 for skill checks to, perhaps, deceive or intimidate a Myconid guard, give a dexterity check mid-dungeon to avoid a surprise trap, and more.

There’s plenty that’s locked away for the full game, such as character development options and actually getting to visit taverns to pick up side-quests, so the demo gives just a brief but enticing taster of what’s to come. This is also purely flatscreen, with the full game promising PC VR and PSVR 2 support at launch – which I really rather enjoyed for my VR review of this game.

There’s a few knocks to the feature set of the demo that I really hope aren’t issues for the full game, and they mainly come within the settings menu… or the almost total lack of one. Demeo had tons of options for inverting camera controls, button remapping and more, but none of that is present in Battlemarked’s demo. Additionally, there’s no character outlines for characters that are obscured by the scenery, and that’s more problematic with a gamepad, when the zoom and angle is more rigidly fixed. I also wish it was made more abundantly clear that you’ve retrieved the key needed to use the level exit, and which of your characters has it – the icon is just a bit too small.

All in all, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked might have a trickier title to utter than a typical D&D conjuration, but blending Demeo’s moreish dungeon crawling with the trappings of D&D are simply delightful.

Tags: Demeo, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, Dungeons and Dragons