Din’s Curse + Demon War Review

RPG Codex has put together a one page review for Soldak Entertainment’s Din’s Curse and its expansion Demon War. The reviewer seems impressed with the title and recommends it, although not without noting some flaws. Here’s a snippet:

Din’s Curse is unique in how much of the game is procedurally generated, and how it evolves dynamically. In this game, being told that ‘bad guys are starting an uprising’ will mean bad guys will actually rise up into your town instead of obediently waiting to be stopped in the nick of time like almost every other RPG. It’s fantastic: the ‘Diablo with dungeons that fight back’ moniker is wholly justified. It is not only the bad guys who get up to stuff (besides invasion, they also lay curses which give debuffs until you take the quest to solve it, produce machines to make dungeons harder, block the gates, fight amongst themselves, etc.) the good guys can also head off to do the quests themselves, turn on each other, or betray the town in any number of ways. Occasionally the system unfairly shafts you: once all three of my key NPCs killed each other whilst the last standing survivor turned rogue and left, losing me the map; another time one of nastier monsters was made a boss type, leading to a behemoth with a DPS almost two orders of magnitude higher than mine. Yet these cases are rare – for the other 30 ish hours of playtime, it worked perfectly. Although ‘living world’ is inaccurate for a game where the NPCs are primarily objects and quest-givers, it is definitely a ‘living situation’: there’s considerable strategy as to how to prioritize the various quests, most of which are on a hidden timer.

The dungeon mechanics are very good, with a variety of items you interact with to stop it being an oddly-shaped field to hunt the monsters in. Besides stashes of loot and destructible, there are pillars you can attack to cause cave-ins, doors and destructible you can set on fire to damage monsters, traps, obelisks which confer various spells on frob, temporal vortices that slow down ranged attacks, and more. The monsters can even build machines to make the dungeon more difficult to fight in (darker, foggier, etc).

However, not all is in perfect harmony. Although there is a healthy diversity of loot (using the ‘set prefix/suffix gives certain modifiers’ school) which scales well, but the system suffers from over-detail: even common items have several modifiers, and I quickly converted from trying to work out if 0.2% more critical hit chance and +2 intelligence was worth more than a +4 defense and 0.6% chance of a spell cast on hit to just equipping myself with the most expensive items I had. Besides this, it makes the loot pretty faceless and generic: even ego artifact weapons (which level up if you use them enough) will not be able to keep up with the newer items you get on level up.