26.5 hours played
Written 13 days ago
I recommend Book of Demons on sale for $15 or less. There's a lot to like but I find that the Paper Diablo format falls apart under the added mob "complexity" by the third act and the finale, post-game and harder difficulties often become a chore. It's an enjoyable reheating of Diablo 1 until then. The $25 price tag is worth it if you fall in love with this particular style of masochism, especially picking up a lot more play time trying all of the classes.
There's nothing new being done with the setting, another admittedly solid brick in the legacy of game devs remaking Diablo 1 or 2 as homage. It's the exact same story beat for beat. BoD is more tongue in cheek about it, mostly in the sassy banter of the player characters, the waaaaacky bosses and the on the nose townsfolk dialogue, but it gets the job done in being a bleak descent into a haunted church and then Hell, fighting the undead and demons all the way. Some referential achievements and picking up turds doesn't make for a bad game, I'm a fan of Binding of Isaac after all. The humor can be amusing(Anti-Pope hit just right) and the hero personalities and voice actor work are the best additions.
What sets BoD apart from Diablo is that you're in a simplified ARPG, think Paper Mario where damage values cap around 1-3 but you can still build up pleasing combos and burst beyond the power curve, and a rogue-like/deck-builder game. There's separate difficulties for post-game so you'll play the campaign on normal + casual/normal(ahh, normal normal for normies) or normal + rogue-like, which truly randomizes card acquisition vs getting them in a semi-set order. Cards grant your abilities, consumables and some "gear" which are passives that trade max mana for benefits. That's right, it's an ARPG with almost no loot other than some resources and the cards themselves. There is some pleasing inventory management at least, especially as the rogue. Paying a cost in consumable gear or mana to equip a click enhancer is a smart addition to the genre.
Where BoD hits or misses is the additions it makes to the noble field of left-clicking monsters past that. Some monsters are armored and you have to get close enough to click down their shield barrier. Some cast spells and you need to be close enough to click and block their spells. Some are fire, ice, poison or stone. Poison heals against your poison, fire and ice want you to use elemental counters and stone cheats. Positioning matters a lot and from there you learn to recognize enemy varieties, with zombies tending to be poisoned and explode on death, the various casters, spiders like to ambush you to force you into melee and gargoyles waste your time.
Right, time for the turd coin in the room: the more of these mobile game time wasters occur at once the worse the game feels. To a point there is a very pleasing puzzle to solve based on priority of engaging enemies. Don't let yourself get boxed in by melee, swap elements for targets, be observant and in position to dodge enemy attacks and block the spells you can, burst down targets of opportunity like spellcasters or archers, etc. Where it starts to suck comes up more and more often: being in Hell, Act 3 and trying to get through two 10-heart stone gargoyles spamming slowing ice bolts on you as an armored caster whose armor refreshes every 4 beats and becomes invulnerable every 5 beats to cast spells AND a spider-plant teleports on top of you like clockwork 3 times in the approach doesn't make an insurmountable challenge, it makes a bloody chore. Oh, and they can jump away at any moment and full heal in statue form before you can physically close to re-aggro them. There feels to be a bit of imbalance in class design and card discovery here. Having disenchant and mass dispel up as the sorcerer while slamming out on-demand 4 heart damage cuts through things much more cleanly than my rogue run.
Sure, there's the deck-building element and "prepare better" comes to mind, burn your resources when you need to, you can even freely swap cards at will unless they're cursed/locked(higher difficulty freeplays) so you always have everything accessible(unless you've yet to find the specific card) but it still becomes a slog. I play in "time moves when you do" mode which makes the omnimancer approach even more feasible yet I still often feel so... tired trying to resolve some of these fights. Whereas most ARPGs have a power curve where you become a screen-clearing deity and BoD also has a pleasing power curve it seems to have finally offered an endgame where the enemies are able to stop you. Maybe that will appeal to the hardcore and I'm steadily cracking freeplay myself but it culminated in the last boss being a dreadful bore. Invincible to cast spells with interrupts blocked, click shield to break armor, untargetable while flying, armor refreshes, surrounded by group-healing stone mobs, rinse and repeat, the only solace being that he doesn't heal himself. There's a disconnect versus the source material where you never had to delay significantly to cut down Mephisto, Diablo or Baal if you were strong enough to go at them in the first place!
I won't say it's bad but it becomes strained at times. Aside from end game pains BoD is pretty enjoyable as a ARPG-lite rehash, a Paper Diablo in aesthetic and numbers you can gradually grind down since you can almost always retreat or camp a health fountain or use your second bar to have all-potion access for free until late post-game difficulties. Claim a win against Legally Distinct El Devil and put the game down until the urge to try the other classes hits. I don't want to hold a grudge against the extra parts for obsessives having niche appeal: that's the point! It's a decent game, even better on sale and you can decide how much you enjoy grinding your face against that wall of stone hearts to master it.
