Clash At Demonhead Review

What can I say about Clash at Demonhead other then this is some amazing box art. The game itself, well, let’s just say the myth is greater than the reality.

First, let’s just get this out of the way. The Scott Pilgrim thing is dumb. It’s almost as dumb as Ready Player One.

Ok. Now we’ve got that out of the way.

Billy “Big Bang” Blitz works for SABRE. That’s the Special Assault Brigade for Real Emergencies for those of you that aren’t in the know. Mary, is at work fling, gives him a call on his vacation to tell him that Professor Plum, inventor of the Doomsday Bomb, has gone missing.

Billy, while on the hunt for the Prof., encounters Tom Guycot. He’s a skeleton and he’s behind the whole thing. All across the land of Demonhead (where the clash in the title takes place) are some medallions that are required to active at the bomb. We should probably get those first.

Along the way we meet a shopkeep with a mustache (that was missing the Japanese version), a hermit who wants to teach us mental powers, a co-agent with SABRE, demons, ghosts, a mermaid, aliens, a talking robot dog, a singing bush, a race of bird people that live under water, a… You know what. That really went off the rails. Sorry. Not ALL of those things are in the game.

Speaking of the game, we’ve got an open world action adventure thing. Think of it almost like Zelda 2 or even Chip ‘n Dale in a way. We have a world map where we go from Point A to Point B, and the “action” segments are what takes us from A to B. The route from A -> B and from B -> A play out the same, but in reverse. Know what I mean? It’s the same “zone” but you travel it right to left instead of left to right.

There are over 40 different routes you can take in the course of the game and you really do have to spend some time exploring and finding your war around.

There’s a few bosses, and abilities and equipment to find that will unlock new paths for you to go and explore on your way. BBBB (that’s Billy), can run and jump and has a pretty basic firearm to start with and he’s pretty terrible but with all the abilities and upgrades he ends up being almost adequate when it’s all said and done.

Speaking of almost adequate, Vic Tokai worked on this game and “developer superstars” aren’t exactly the lane they choose to travel in. Their games, for the most are, are adequate. The graphics in the game, other than looking like a fever dream sometimes, are adequate. Sprites are ok, colors are bold a vivid, but everything’s just weird. The dialog is weird, the designs are weird, BBBB is kind of weird, there are random floating angel babies, the enemies are weird. It’s just weird.

And the music really kind of follows suit. You cannot argue that it is not music. But is it music you’d want to listen to anywhere else? No. I don’t think it. It’s primitive. two or three voice tracks, a lot of bleeps and bloops, some noise here and there. It’s really not very good. The consistent thing I remember about the music when I played this game was it was all pretty bad. Not terrible, just bad. And I wouldn’t wait for it to be over.

The game is kind of like that. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s so weird I honestly probably wouldn’t have stuck with it. It’s probably on the low said of average for me but it’s just weird enough that I wanted to see more of the weird. And trust me if you make it to the end of this game it goes off the rails with the weird.