Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is a game that immediately charms you… once you’ve finished reading the dissertation-length title and start playing it. Taking the digital boardgaming of Demeo and mixing it with the setting and tropes of Dungeons & Dragons, it presents a light, fun and accessible entry into the preeminent world of role playing games.
There’s two campaigns to delve into within Battlemarked, visiting the well-known regions of Neverwinter and Icewind Dale from the wider D&D world, both of which are on the cusp of disaster with the need for an adventuring party of heroes to step in and rescue the situation.
This provides one of the biggest differences to Demeo, as the campaigns are more than just battling through multi-level dungeons. The stories pick up in a thoroughly traditional D&D fashion, you’ve got dialogue with other characters, skill check rolls to see if you can avoid battles, and a map of the region where you can choose between main quest locations, side missions and more to visit. With voiced narration and how each scenario is framed, it does a great job of capturing the structure and tone of a D&D adventure, even if the story itself is pretty rote and predictable. If you just want to dungeon crawl? Well, the two main dungeons from each campaign can be unlocked to play separately, though you need to beat them first.
As with Demeo, everything is rendered as though it’s this gloriously elaborate tabletop RPG boardgame, moving static digital figured around the board, instead of having their limbs articulate to run around, rolling dice and seeing them bounce around the environment, but still having flames, water, lightning and more elemental effects shoot through the levels. Playing on a flatscreen, it might take you a good long while to realise that this board is actually situated within a 3D environment, catching little peripheral glimpses of hanging wall art as you zoom in, and then taking more control of the camera to look around. It’s there so that you’re sharing the same space as anyone that’s playing in VR, and a nice bit of continuity between the two modes.
The fundamentals here remain the same as in Demeo, just with all the D&D classes, enemies and abilities now folded into the experience. That means that when you’re stuck in the thick of the action, you’ll have two action points per turn with which to move and to playing abilities from a hand of cards and items. As you look to attack, you’ll be rolling a bespoke 20-sided die which is all successful hits, bar for the one critical hit and critical failure. It’s a simplified rendition of role playing that’s much more like a dedicated boardgame than a turn-based RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3, and that keeps things nice and light as you go dungeon crawling and battling through throngs of enemies.
And there really can be some big hordes that you face off against. When you get down into a dungeon, you’re working through multiple levels, searching for an enemy that holds the key to the exit, which you also need to find. Countless times, you’ll open up a door and find half a dozen enemies waiting for you on the other side – not least because dungeons have an endless spawn mechanic. Time it well within the turn order and you’ll have the drop on a cluster of enemies, able to then unleash chained magical attacks and control the zone of engagement, but do it with the last character in your turn and you could be put on the back foot.
You can include four characters in your party, with a Dragonborn Paladin, Tiefling Rogue, Hallfling Wizard, and more in the line up of six defined classes. You sadly don’t have a full character creator, but can tweak the colours through their design, give them a custom name, and as you level up, have some limited ways to tweak the class build. You’ll put points from levelling up into the main class skill, and then chosen sub-attributes, picking from three options at each point, which can be chance-based boosts, additional damage, or even new skill cards. This isn’t the traditional RPG power scaling, but every little boost will help.
You’ve got a hand of ten cards, unless you spend upgrades to expand it, and that includes the fixed abilities, as well as items. As you open chests in the level, buy them from a shop, and earn them periodically for dishing out damage, it can become a real juggling act, and you’ll often feel like you’re missing some of the best abilities. I regularly find myself dismissing cards I don’t want, and you’ll have to do this preemptively as cards earned are just chucked in the bin automatically if your hand is filled.
It’s all part of the tactical management you engage in through battle, choosing when to open a chest for maximum benefit, or go back and use a healing fountain, how to use barrels and AoE attacks, when to delay a hero’s turn so that another can soften up enemies, and so on. Playing solo you’ve got a pretty full overview of the possibilities, but in multiplayer you’ll need to talk and coordinate through your options. I’d love to be able to see other people’s hands, or inspect and manage out of turns, but that’s a relatively minor quibble.
One thing I do feel throughout is a slight clumsiness to interacting with the game. As charming as it is to move a hero unit through the 3D levels, to roll a die and see it bounce of the scenery, to take a card from your hand to deliberately place it, it’s also a little bit of a chore and difficult to parse at times. Scenery can often get in the way of visualising AoE attacks and movements, thanks to the strict camera angle when playing on 2D, and selecting a card often puts the initial target point far away from anything that’s relevant, making you scroll around. It’s also a bit too easy to accidentally just move and not attack at the end of it, as you choose the position and then try to nudge into the target for a basic attack. It feels as though this game was designed with VR more in mind, but here you have to deal with some VR pointing jitter when selecting cards to play, and it’s easy to be too far away from what you can reach and have to drag yourself over.
That said, playing in VR is a real treat. The characters look so much more physical and model-like in VR, and there’s great flexibility to being able to move your view around. Heck, you can even zoom all the way in until your shoulder-to-shoulder with the characters.
At launch one a big complaint was that you had to fill vacant slots with basic level 1 ‘Hireling’ versions of characters that couldn’t be levelled up. Thankfully Resolution Games has already started to rework this – an update last week now means you can have full-fledged, upgradable heroes in all your slots in a single player party, and a similar update is set to come for multiplayer as well.
