Demo: Conquest Dark

I love game demos.

For one, they're free - come and try our game. If you don't like it, no big deal, move on. I generally don't write about demos that don't click with me because I don't feel like I've given the game a fair shake, and in part because enjoyment of a game is different for everyone and I wouldn't want to dissuade someone from just trying out a game themselves.

Another point in their favor - I really enjoy the initial parts of encountering a game and figuring out what it is, how to play it and become good at it, those first moments of being lost and not understanding what you can or should do, when the possibilities of what this thing could be are wide open and you embark on discovering something for yourself. In this case, the journey of discovery begins as I start off by choosing the one visible city on the campaign map(?), picking a class and profession (Dude with a bow), and was immediately thrown into a Vampire-Survivors style fight with a 10-minute timer, painfully slow skeletal opponents, and now I'm currently just attempting to fight them by punching them.

What's the good of choosing a bow proficiency if I ain't got no bow?!?

I manage to knuckle-dust one and thankfully it had just what I need.

I hope you like naked, armed men.

Now we're talking. The bow is good, and I leveled up and got a fan of knives skill that wrecks shop.

Things are looking up.

One difference from Vampire Survivors is that it's a twin-stick system, you can aim and move independently of each other, but our hero auto-attacks constantly and your main job is to move him around to kill things while avoiding damage.

As the timer ticks down I'm seeing more enemy variety - both these centurions and some archer groups showed up.

Commander Urien here and his two huge balls had a cool graphical change from this to a withered skeleton as I did damage to him.

With the ritual completed at ten minutes, these wraiths show up and end you. They can be damaged so they appear to be killable but they're too tough and too fast for me to stand any chance at all.

Thus endeth the first character. I am unclear on why we are performing rituals that will definitely kill us.

It appears to have unlocked or affected many things that I don't understand yet. Back on the campaign map, it looks like each 'level' is a separate vampire-survivors esque setting with different enemies and unlocks.

There are cool things like Factions that you can level up for character-wide bonuses.

My next character at the next ritual site ends up being a Barbarian with a primary melee attack that sends out massive shockwaves after hitting someone with her mace a couple times or using her dodge / leap ability. It's really fun, plus she has a neat passive called 'Execute' which randomly smashes three enemies every second if they're 'injured' (I suspect that means < 50% health).

It's very satisfying to hit a group with a wave and then hear the 'crunch, crunch, crunch' beat of them dying from Execute after the hit. This is a fun game!

Unlike Vampire Survivors where it's mainly just outrunning the enemy horde while you let your attacks run on autopilot to clear the screen, in this so far there's a more intentional balance of you aiming to kill enemies or choosing some to pick on in melee targets - boss fights with this Barbarian were interesting because I still had to get close to them to do damage while dodging their attacks. The campaign map is a nice replacement for a simple upgrade menu for general power unlocks. I like this demo a lot, you may want to give it a whirl for yourself if you like Vampire Survivors type games.