I did some rapid fire demo playing last night on my 360 and decided to report the results in short form. This is totally judging a book by it’s cover, but I feel like it will expose some of the do’s and don’ts of making a successful demo. Here is the snapshot of the games and whether I liked them:
- Civilization: Revolution – No
- Dark Sector – No
- Lego Indiana Jones – No
- Skate – Yes
- Tee It Up Golf – No
Keep reading for my full thoughts on how well these demos sold me on the the full game and why.
Civilization: Revolution
I need to start here by pointing out some personal bias that definitely affected my playing of this demo. I love the original Civilization. It to this day remains as one of my favorite games of all time. I never played any of the sequels and so that pure first version is what I have as the golden standard.
Revolution captures the same basic gameplay as the original, wrapped up with some interface simplifications and shiny graphics. It captures the basics really well and managed to make a decently complex game much, much more accessible. The problems I ran into with this though are that it does oversimplify some aspects such as science to the point where I could not find any possible way to access that menu. Research was only decided once you finished the previous research and then was locked in, which felt very strange to me since it could easily have been a menu.
The thing that killed me on this game was the turn structure and the avatars. If you can remember “clippy” the world’s most annoying paperclip from the Microsoft Office products a few years back then you have a pretty good idea what the “helpful” avatars in this game are like. Biggest difference here is that they actually cover up interface elements that would be useful and they talk in annoying jibberish instead of reading the help text. I was able to ignore them somewhat and keep playing until the turns started randomly (probably had some sort of system, but it felt random) auto-completing and I couldn’t seem to get 3 units onto the same square to form an army. It was really frustrating considering how simple the game is supposed to be that it took away some control from me and I couldn’t easily figure out how to resolve it.
That made me pretty much stop playing because the game actually annoyed me, and if I wanted to play the same classic game I would just go boot up FreeCiv for free. Also I think that I shouldn’t have to sit through a start screen CG sandwich just to play the game. I know that your game is cool, I don’t need to sit through “cool” computer graphic cinematic scenes that have nothing to do with anything, they don’t impress me, gameplay does.
Verdict: Did not complete demo, not interested in trying full version based on the demo.
(Sadie): I tried the PC demo of Civilization: Revolution and I don’t think I’ll ever play the game and enjoy it. I’m not a fan of the first game and I didn’t actually know that there was a first but the game commercials and the premise seemed interesting. The first thing I noticed about the game is how similar it was to Risk and since I hate Risk, well it was pretty much downhill from there. I decided to just jump right in without a tutorial and that was a mistake as I had NO CLUE as to what I was doing. So I jumped back into the tutorial which started to really drag on and I was later told that it’s about 2 hours long. You have a character of Sid in the corner telling you what to do yet his mouth doesn’t move and he frequently waves at you. Then you have step by step directions on what to do but it never really explains why. The game overall is just to confusing for someone who is looking to just jump right in and play. I’m sure there are hours of fun to be had but if you can’t dedicate the time to learn, it doesn’t matter.
Sadie’s Verdict: Did not complete demo, not interested in trying full version whatsoever.
Dark Sector
Dark Sector is supposed to be a Gears of War like third person shooter with a cover system and all that adds a glaive weapon to the mix. At least that’s the condensed pitch that I received. What struck me first about this game is that it felt sluggish, and only chose to rip-off GoW on a surface level, which. as weird as it sounds. makes things worse. You also have the supercool glaive to throw which you can perform timing tricks with to do 4x damage and can even guide it by hand in a bullet-time fashion. I mention the glaive because it is the item that is fairly unique to this game, but it also renders the traditional weaponry almost useless. Why use weaponry that you can’t guide, that can’t pass through multiple enemies, that has limited ammo, and sometimes even has limited time (enemies guns can have a little det-pack on them so they only last a couple seconds once you touch them)?
Acting as the nail in the coffin was what I felt was sloppy level design in that I got stuck TWICE in the 15 minutes I played because for all the other tutorials there were some other things that I apparently had to figure out for myself. The feel of the level never really gave me a clear sense of where I should be going unless it was a direct path, as soon as an area opened up a little it became very confusing what was what. Blurry rain effects also helped to complicate this a bit. As a demo it just seemed very bland and did nothing but lay bare the controls of the game without providing any context or motivation to do anything.
Verdict: Did not complete demo, not interested in trying full version based on the demo.
Lego Indiana Jones
Lego Indiana Jones has been getting some good reviews in general, and I found that I ran into most of the grievances that people had with it during the demo. This game would be great for a young audience, but for me it really seemed far too casual and simplistic. I can definitely see why this series gets the praise it does, it looks sharp, it is easy to learn, and the game in general seems polished to some degree. Between the childishly simple gameplay and contextual control issues it’s just not my thing.
Verdict: Did not complete demo, not interested in trying full version based on the demo.
Skate
Skate is a game that I have heard a lot about, and was excited to play. It delivered almost exactly what I expected and definitely got me hooked. The basic premise of the game is that it is a completely fresh take on the skateboarding game with an emphasis on realistic controls and tricks without going over the top. This is clearly the market reacting to the direction that the Tony Hawk franchise has chosen to go, and I couldn’t be happier.
I remember when the first Tony Hawk game came out it was a complete blast to play, but the further iterations in the series didn’t really do a whole lot for me other than adding 2 new mechanics and just going further off the deep end with the crazy levels and tricks. I actually placed second in a tournament for the original Tony Hawk at a local game store. Skate brought back a lot of those early feelings in a whole new way. I really feel like when you pull off a trick in this game you get a much greater reward out of it because it takes a lot more skill to complete anything. The trick ends up looking fairly realistic, but you feel more accomplished than you would doing a crazy one in any of the Tony Hawk games.
Having a time limited demo also helped because you got a bit of free reign to try tricks out. Very well done demo for a game that seems like a lot of fun.
Verdict: Completed demo, very interested in trying full version based on the demo.
Golf: Tee It Up!
Golf: Tee It Up! came out alongside Schizoid on the Xbox Live Arcade and hopes to offer a bite-sized version of the casual golfing genre. It seemed fun enough as I played through it, it just seemed like there are already too many good versions of this game out in the market. You can already buy golf games that span the spectrum from casual titles like Hot Shots to more realistic views like Tiger Woods. I just don’t see a need for this mediocre rehash of something that has been done to death already.
Verdict: Completed demo, not interested in trying full version.
And finally a bonus demo review from Sadie:
Echochrome
I never read into what Echochrome was but I remember seeing a lot of hype surrounding this game. The demo proved to me that I need to pay a little more attention to hype because this game is this year’s Portal. Simple graphics make for a complex game system that had my friends asking, “How did they code that?!”. The game is black and white but it still manages to look absolutely stunning (or is this because it was on a 60 inch TV?) and the game play is anything but simplistic. The goal of the game is to “follow the echo” or reach the marker which happens to be a shaded version of your character. However, getting from A to B proves difficult when you are presented with barriers and when it seems almost impossible, it really isn’t. The game is based around 5 rules which govern how you control the world. It’s all about changing perspective on things which is very fascinating to me. I liked the demo so much that I downloaded the game.
Verdict: Completed demo and purchased game.
