DAEMONSGATE by Imagitec

          Computer        Graphics        Memory          Disk Space
Minimum     286             VGA                              8 MB

Control: Keyboard, Joystick or Mouse
  Sound: Adlib, Sound Blaster, Roland

DAEMONSGATE is a decent role-playing game crippled by a horrible user interface. If it had been done right, this Ultima 6 - style game could have made a pleasant diversion for RPG fans waiting for the next Big Release. As it is, I can only recommend Daemonsgate to people who are either very bored or true masochists.

You have to give Imagitec credit for trying, though. The plot is fairly interesting: demons have poured forth upon the world, no one knows how or why; coming up from the southern kingdoms, they are laying siege to Tormis. An agent of Tormis' king, you must follow leads to the cause of the invasion, trekking by land and sea to a score of towns and cities, and ultimately close the demons' gate -- the Daemonsgate -- once and for all.

The actual tasks you engage in on your quest are spiritually similar to Ultima 6, in that you get a fair number of "A sends you to B who asks for item X which C will give you in return for Y" quests. This naturally results in your spending a lot of time roaming around the world. It's a mostly linear procedure -- you can accidentally jump in ahead of the plotline, but you won't know what to do with the clues you get. Since Imagitec has written a fairly interesting, realistic and fully realized world, the story would be fairly enjoyable, if routine, if the interface didn't make it so painful.

The overall game system is likewise pretty intelligent. You can talk to anyone about anything, which in turn will provide you with new keywords to ask people about. You can recruit interested individuals to join your party; each person has an array of abilities and skill levels, and can study, teach or practice skills to improve them. There are three kinds of magic, each a skill of its own: herbalism (making potions for temporary ability boosts), elementalism (summoning generic spirits to strengthen weapons or fight independently), and daemonology (summoning really nasty spirits for the same purposes).

YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE HOUSES, ALL ALIKE.

What turns this potentially pleasant game into a candidate for "DEL *.*" is the interface. Never mind the mere nuisance of inventory and conversation actions that take four or five clicks when they should take one, and poor or nonexistent documentation for everything from buying ship's passage to using first aid kits: the real death-by-boredom is moving across a city. You can spend 15 minutes walking from one end of town to the other. I have spent literally hours walking up and down streets in a single section of town looking for the one useful house out of a maze of identical, nonenterable private houses.

In Bethesda's ARENA, there is an overhead map, people will give you directions, and the important buildings have signs you can see in the distance. In Origin's ULTIMA 6, there were far fewer buildings, most were shaped distinctly and all of them were useful. In DAEMONSGATE, even on a 486/66 your character plods at a snail's pace past row after row of identical, useless houses. There is no way to know which houses are useful until you come to the doorway. There is no automap, no source of directions, no escape from hours of boring exploration looking for the house so-and-so told you your next contact was in. In a game with a couple dozen people to track down, the wasted hours rack up and up, and the boredom with them. After a while, it's just not worth it unless you absolutely, positively have nothing else to do.

Aside from this deadly flaw, the rest of the game is mostly fair but flawed in several places. Combat is represented by ludicrous centimeter- high tin-soldier graphics on a tactical grid with an interface that is difficult to control. Fortunately, you don't need much control once you have a character buy a book on Elementalism, study it to mastery, enchant and resell swords for big profits with which to enchant giant elemental- powered swords for the whole party. Then your demigods can waltz over just about everything. Of course, combat proceeds at the same snail's pace as everything else, so you'll probably want to just use the Escape feature whenever combat starts.

Conversation is a similarly mixed bag. There's lots of local color in this game, as characters evince provincial or familial sentiments toward other people or regions. There are also lots of bugs that will put garbage on your screen, as well as foolish errors such as characters on the street who declaim (when asked their occupation) "I am the proprietor of this inn". What, the Portapotty Pub?

Sound is acceptable. Documentation is great on storytelling, bad on explanation and (at least in my box) with the pages bound out of order -- a real annoyance in a game that asks you to look up a word in the manual every time you start, especially a game that hangs every now and then.

It really is a pity that Daemonsgate has these flaws, some of which are no doubt due to all the trouble the designers had in getting it published. I don't doubt it was a labor of love for them, right down to the cute but irrelevant videotape included in the box. The plot is really quite interesting in the abstract; at each step you're very curious to find out what happens next. But unless you, too, feel obligated to write a review of the game, it's not worth your time to get to the next plot step by spending hours, up and down the maze of twisty little houses, all alike...