| Demon Island | |
| by Ross Yancey | |
| Alcritas’ Review | |
Demons, Demons, and Demons — Oh my! To put it simply, that’s the plot of Demon Island by Ross Yancey (yancey@bmi.net) — some island somewhere has been enslaved by Demons — go save it.
Quite honestly, I’m shocked that this scenario was created. On one hand, the author displays an excellent command of the scenario editor — the opening is fast and dramatic and there are many well executed special nodes — including one very impressive cinematic sequence, something I thought impossible within the BOE editor prior to witnessing it here. But on the other hand, the scenario suffers from a VERY fatal flaw.
Demons, Demons, and more Demons. There’s plenty of combat, problem is 95%+ of it involves nothing other than Demons (and the creatures they summon). Now, 95% of the combat being within a family of monsters might be survivable for one of three reasons — the first being a great diversity within the monster class. To cite a common example I’d point to Tatterdemalion — midway through the scenario you’ll fight many, many battles with the Avians, but it doesn’t become a problem because of the wide variety of Avians. To his credit, Yancey quickly introduces other varieties than the standard Hordling/Imp/Demon/Mung/Haakai assortment, but that’s only a little redemption. Without any custom graphics, fighting “Nightmare Imps” doesn’t come across as anything original. Big bad boss monsters — that look like Haakais, and function like tough Haakais isn’t much better. It just doesn’t do anything to relieve the monotony of the combat. The scenario might also hope to survive this flaw by making most of the combat unique and interesting, and it does do that in a few situations. The Dragons’ cave and the original encounter with the Nightmare Imps are both well thought out, and executed sequences. But there’s just not enough of these spread out through the scenario to solve the problem. Perhaps if there weren’t constant wandering groups of Demons, both in virtually every town as well as outdoors, or perhaps if there were far fewer set Demonic encounters, the few special encounters that do exist would be sufficient, but here they’re not. The final way the scenario could possible escape this flaw would be to greatly limit the overall amount of combat — 95% of only a few fights might be tolerable.
As alluded to earlier, however, the scenario doesn’t come anywhere close to this. To put it bluntly, less Americans died at Antietam than Demons perished by my party. But what makes this all SO much worse is that your foes aren’t pushovers. Repetitive combat is annoying to begin with, combat where you’re CONSTANTLY threatened with being wiped out grates on you that much faster. Your spellcasters better have a TON of spell points, as you’ll be casting Ravage Spirit an average of three or four times a minute while playing. Ten minutes into the scenario I was wishing for a hot key that would cast the spell without pulling up the priest menu, or anything similar. That desire never subsisted — until I quit the scenario.
Demon Island is designed for Very High level parties, and is rated PG.
My score: 3.5
— Alcritas