I liked Demon Tides, but I really wanted to love it

Demon Tides is a competent 3D platformer with a few too many layers of unnecessary stuff. Development studio Fabraz really makes some endearing games, though.

I really wanted to like Demon Tides more than I did. It’s not poorly made, but it has a number of decisions that I didn’t really vibe with.

The game structure is like Bowser’s Fury, which is itself kind of a simplified Wind Waker—you just sail around to where you want to go, and the game is split up into three chunks of map depending on how many gears you’ve collected.

Sailing is boring. There’s no real sense of exploration, and there’s a lot of “dead water” to get through to find things. Couple that with a mediocre map, and by the late game I actually unlocked multiple islands on my map, but it was nearly impossible to tell I hadn’t actually visited them.

I get what they were trying to do, but a level select screen would’ve been much better. And with a level select screen, they could’ve pushed the areas a little bit harder in terms of variety. Since everything is basically an island, they all broadly have an oval shape around the edge, and then a bunch of random peaks and buildings so they can actually make interesting platforming.

The movement feels great, but the learning curve is steep. They added even more maneuvers in this game compared to its predecessor, and the game could honestly use a flow chart to describe the possible state transitions.

I mostly got the hang of it by the end of my time with the game (a bit over 30 hours, collecting all 45 gears, and beating the bonus level), but there were definitely quite a few failures that consisted of me simply pressing a button sequence in the wrong order, because the game has so many movement options. I think that boosting in particular probably made this game worse than its predecessor, because it pushes your platforming distance even further out, which negatively impacts the level design.

3D platformers always have a fine line to walk, because depth perception is fake in video games. And this game barely gets a pass through a clever hack—rather than having any sort of useful automatic camera placement to help you see the level from a good angle, they just gave you the ability to use RB on the controller to jump, so you could keep your right thumb on the control stick to change camera angles at all times. The game would be absurdly frustrating without this control choice. It was weird at first, but you get used to RB as the primary button, like you do in Dark Souls.

I’m not really sure why this game has combat or boss fights. Most of them just didn’t feel fun.

The music is great, and I particularly enjoyed how 2 Mello’s vocal layers would come in during the hype moments of boss fights.

The graphics generally look gorgeous, and I was really into the facial expressions and character designs. The world is just extremely charming to me.

Despite my misgivings with learning its complexities, there’s plenty of satisfying platforming to be had. It’s just wrapped in a couple layers of stuff I didn’t really enjoy.

The game also features a ton of items you can equip that further alter your movement abilities… which is really cool, but it also means you can trivialize many sections of the game with the right combinations of items equipped. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to beat the entire game without using any of these upgrades, though, so you could simply ignore all but the cosmetic ones if you wanted to keep maximum platforming challenge.

My overall feeling with this game is: competent developer makes overly ambitious third installment in their platforming series. Despite the gorgeous graphics and banging tunes, you might be better off buying the incredibly affordable predecessor game, Demon Turf: Color Splash, to scratch that 3D platforming itch.