Last night was officially demo night here at the completionist.com complex. All demos all the time (minus small breaks to check in on the Olympics, because someone here is obsessed with them. Someone who is not me.) Because we value our readers so highly, we’re going to share our journey with you, so you don’t have to waste your time playing demos yourselves. I’m sure you have more important things to do.

Too Human

Our demo-licious evening all started because Chris wanted to play the Too Human demo. I’d just read the review on 1UP, which uses phrases like:

“Too Human is also not a good action game”

“The game is simply schizophrenic; it attempts to be all things to all people and never succeeds in executing any of them well.”

“Attempting fancy aerial attacks exposes just how inadequate and unresponsive this control method is”

Despite a horrible review, they still gave the game a C-, which, according to their ridiculous rating system, is “average”. Crazy rating skewing is a topic for another post, though. Long story short: this game is not very good. I was mildly intrigued by the attack system of just flicking your right control stick in the direction of the enemy you want to hit, as it’s a nice change of pace from the furious button pressing you get in most hack-and-slash games, but everything else was terrible. Your character can jump, but I’m not really sure why, since every part of every environment (while it may appear otherwise) is a sheer cliff. We had an item fall on a rock that wasn’t even shin high, but we couldn’t get it because it was somehow out of bounds. You can’t get within an arms length of anything, and there are invisible walls everywhere. The voice acting is good, but the dialog is so bad it doesn’t matter. The equipment/charm system is confusing, and while I usually enjoy skill trees, I couldn’t really notice any difference in our performance after leveling up several times. Chris complained about the camera, but that’s not exactly news. I wanted to like this game, because the developer is Canadian, and they were the guys who did Eternal Darkness, which I loved, but Too Human was a serious waste of time.

Verdict: If you want to play this game, you should play Mass Effect instead. If you’ve already played Mass Effect, you won’t want to play this game.

Braid

I’ve been wanting to try this one out for quite awhile, and I wasn’t disappointed. Braid is a puzzle-ish platformer, and it was easy to pick up and figure out. Each “world” has several stages where puzzle pieces are scattered for you to pick up. The puzzle pieces are in plain sight, the challenge is to figure out how to reach them. You can die, but you can also turn back time à la Prince of Persia. This is great for this type of game because it eliminates the waiting around for an enemy to run his full circuit and come back to you so you can bounce on his head to get a puzzle piece. Missed your timing? Rewind and try again. Braid reminded me of an old PC game I used to play called Challenge of the Ancient Empires, which was an all-time favourite of mine.

Verdict: We “unlocked” (read: paid for) the full version. Totally worth it, I’d recommend checking out the demo if you like platformers or puzzles.

Puzzle Quest

I’ve known about this game for a really long time, so I have no one to blame but myself for not having played it until last night. It’s a puzzle RPG, what was I thinking? Of course I would love this game.

I totally love this game. You get to pick your hero’s appearance and class, and you level up and use your new abilities to attack your enemies in puzzle battles.

Verdict: We bought the full version, and will buy the expansion pack when we’re done. Play this game, or you are a crazy person.

Roogoo

I take full responsibility for the downloading of this demo. I had never heard of the game before, but the icon art hooked me, and I had to see what it was about.

Remember that toy you had as a kid where you put shaped blocks through matching shaped holes in the lid of a bucket? Star goes in star hole, circle goes in circle hole, etc? Roogoo is the video game version of that. I think the story is something about Roogoos turning into Moogoos, and trying to steal asteroids of happiness or something.

Verdict: This game is entertaining for about five seconds, which is convenient, because that’s how long the demo is.

Pixel Junk Eden

The first time I played this demo a few weeks ago, it felt like I was high. I didn’t understand what was going on, but everything looked pretty. Chris figured it out later, and we tried to play a little multiplayer last night, but I was really bringing down the team, so it didn’t last long. If you haven’t tried Eden, I’ll try to explain it a bit. First off, the game looks like this:

The premise is that you are a… bug? I’m not really sure what you are, but you are very small, and you somewhat resemble an Elebit. There are grass/plants/vines around you, and you can jump and latch onto them to move around your 2D environment. The object of the game is to collect pollen, which you get by hitting the “enemies”, which are amoeba-like blobs that are floating around. When you smack them, pollen comes out. Your two modes of movement are launching yourself into the air and then falling, or launching yourself on a sort of tether, which you can swing around on. The pollen you collect fills up something that I’ll call a “pod”, and once the pod is full, you jump into it, and a new plant grows, which you use to go farther up the screen. At the very top of every level is a plant artifact of some sort that you want for some reason. Each level has a time limit, but you can collect more time by swinging/jumping into another kind of blob.

Verdict: Interesting, and I would recommend checking out the demo if you like co-op acid trips, but I don’t think we’ll be investing in the full version.

After Eden was done, we pretty much called it a night (minus a bit more of the Olympics). So here ends the first demo-licious post. If there are any demos you’ve been meaning to try, but haven’t had the time, let us know. We have lots of time.

Playing demos is a fun and cheap way to pass an evening, if you don’t count the cost of your TV, consoles, internet connection and electricity.

The current consoles have wisely chosen to exploit the power of game demos, something PC developers have known about for years. In most cases, I would wager that a demo would motivate someone to buy a game that they would have otherwise passed on.

The exception to these cases would be something like what we saw with Too Human last night, where I was thoroughly disappointed by the demo, so much so that I will probably now pass on the game. I really like Dennis Dyack, the outspoken president of Silicon Knights, makers of Too Human. I was really rooting for the game and hoping he would deliver on his promises but based on what I played last night, it looks as though, sadly, he may have to be owned by the Gaf.

In case you are interested in playing any of the demos mentioned above, Too Human, Braid, Puzzle Quest, and Roogoo are exclusive to the XBox 360 while PixelJunk Eden calls PS3 its home. We were in the process of downloading Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolutions, available on both consoles, when we called it a night. Sadly, it will have to wait for Demo-licious 2.