Book of Demons is a Diablo-esque looter game. The main twist is that rather than getting conventional equipment, like weapons and armor, instead you get “cards”, which serve as both your passive and active abilities. These cards vary by your starting class (though you only can choose the fighter at first, the other two are quickly unlocked), and you can only equip a limited number, with gold in the game serving both to unlock more card slots as well as to help upgrade your cards along with items you find in the dungeons.
The game, unfortunately, is pretty bland. It is very much in the game of older games like Diablo 2, where you have a set of abilities, and they deplete your mana a bit, and otherwise you are clicking on enemies to kill them. There’s nothing flashy here, with all the abilities being fairly basic – knock away and stun nearby enemies, a powerful single target attack that stuns, throwing bombs that deal elemental damage that some enemies are weak to (or more accurately, those enemies are strong against everything BUT those attacks… though you can just give your normal weapon those attributes instead), ect. You have a limited mana pool which is depleted both by using your abilities and in a more permanent fashion by equipping passive abilities that eat up slots but let you have some static ability (like sometimes dropping hearts on the ground that heal you when you take damage). There are even cards that are items, like potions or scrolls, that you can either pay to refill in town or which you can find drops of in the dungeon.
This is not tremendously exciting stuff, and while there are various upgrades (both “magical” cards, which are the same cards but with a couple random abilities, plus “legendary” cards, which are even further improved), you will probably find a good ability set and then not really alter it a huge amount.
There are bosses which are randomly generated on various levels, plus three “set” bosses, which are more impressive fights with more unique mechanics to them. However, none of them really feels like they mix things up all that much, and it doesn’t feel like the game has a huge amount of gameplay variety overall.
With the gameplay being extremely generic for the genre (and also on rails, as you can only go down narrow paths, so all movement is pretty strictly linear, though there are branching paths on each dungeon level), the story is… even more lackluster, really, and feels a bit like it is simultaneously trying to riff on Diablo a bit while also having about as much of a storyline as the original Diablo, which is to say, not very much.
The game has a lot of achievements, and it feels like it is using them as an incentive to keep you playing; not only steam achievements, but also things like in-game avatars. Unfortunately, while there are a fair number of these, it’s not really enough to overcome any of the game’s shortcomings; they’d be a welcome addition if the core gameplay is good, but as-is, they feel like a pavlovian method to keep achievement hunters playing, as the next achievement is always right around the corner.
All in all, this game is pretty meh. The paper cutout aesthetic is okay but it isn’t anything remarkable, and by the first boss, I was pretty sure that the game didn’t have much more to offer. But I kept on playing through the end out of completionist tendencies, and was left feeling like I’d wasted my time a bit. It was cute that they had a little musical number at the end of the game, but, in the end, the cute little touches here and there weren’t enough.
You’ve got better things to do with your time and money.
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