A Shell of a Game
Demonicon has the structure of a much better game. Most of what was put into that structure is not good.
It's part action game part RPG with dialog choices similar to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The RPG system is an adaptation of the Dark Eye pencil & paper system. The action is standard 3rd person melee and spellcasting.
Generally everything works pretty well. The dialog options seem to have real impacts on the story and outcomes, right down to the ending scene you get. The RPG system works pretty well. You have all kinds of points to assign and skills to choose from at each level up. The gear and weapons you choose have a real impact on the way the 3rd person combat plays & feels. The 3rd person action combat is the worst mechanical part of the game. It feels jerky and slow. It has high animation priority without means of cancelling actions (maybe by design). The parry and riposte mechanic is poorly implemented, feeling like a QTE with bad timing.
Unfortunately what they decided to pour into the 3-star shell of a game was mostly liquified shit. Game areas are Heavily re-used with lots of crisscrossing across the same small town. The tutorial dungeon is re-used as the final dungeon in the game! The only other three areas; the swamp, the mining pit, and the final keep are very basic and uninteresting. All the environments feel like "least-effort-possible" designs.
Gear is a joke. You get options for heavy and light armor, sword, mace, axe. There is no variety. Go buy your one upgrade item at the beginning of each story chapter. They might as well hand you the gear at the end of each boss fight and delete all vendors.
Traps and side activities in the environments feel pointless. Trapped chests are just randomly strewn about as if hitting quotas on a checklist. Random spike traps are haphazardly designed into environments to give you a chance to use your disarm skill check. Occasionally you will find a locked cellar in town with some loot. There are plant randomly placed around to give you a chance to craft potions. Potions are mostly pointless though so I don't know why they bothered. You can just buy the good ones. It all feels like an afterthought to give your points in the Dark Eye RPG skills a purpose. They could have removed all of these activities, all crafting, and the entire skills section with zero impact on all other aspects of the game.
The action combat plays decently with a controller. I didn't try it with keyboard or even know if that is possible. It is quite obviously designed to be played with a controller. There is significant input lag and the combat is balanced around animation times. This means you will be making some combat input and then watching the results slowly play out. Sometimes you get to hit 'X' when it flashes up over your character to execute a counter-attack. Mostly the combat doesn't matter after you've upgraded the sword or axe combat skill tree to the final power. Once you have your final melee power, execute it and wreck everything. All challenge is removed from the combat including bosses. The last half of the game becomes extremely tedious.
The story is uneven but not completely uninteresting. It starts out with some good old fashioned brother-sister love, and by love I mean this dude wants to bang his sister. But she's not really his sister so it's cool. Necromancers, undead brothels, a starving population and a city guard of jack-booted dwarf thugs, some intrigue, some ancient demon-god summoning stuff. It's not all bad. Some pieces are surprising and interesting and you do get some agency in how it all turns out. Action-comic style animations on a nice parchment texture play out after each chapter and boss fight. The story is easily the best part of the game.
Overall, don't play this game. I'm sorry I did. It wasn't the worst game of the year but it was bad.