Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked Review

If I were stranded on a deserted island with nothing but my VR headset and I could only have a single game installed on it, that game would have been Demeo up until recently. While the details of the how and why of being on a random island with an out-of-place piece of technology don’t make much sense in the traditional world we live in, it sure does sound like something straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, though. And thankfully, Demeo developer Resolution’s latest title, Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, is here, so that random intro you just read actually makes a bit of sense, since playing this game reminds me a lot of those long D&D sessions with my friends.

Battlemarked retains all the things that I love about Demeo, from the quick-to-learn, rewarding, and strategic battles, to the crossplay multiplayer, to the interesting characters to pick from that offer varied playstyles. In fact, I would say 80% of Battlemarked is Demeo, with the remaining 20% being a new D&D cape draped over it. The most significant new addition to Battlemarked is its two campaigns, which take the Demeo formula out of the randomly generated dungeons you’re used to, and instead drop you into D&D's Forgotten Realms setting, against the backdrop of a quickly approaching war.  There you'll explore forests, towns, and dungeons, all while leveling up your character, discovering new and powerful weapons, and helping the townsfolk with their problems by completing side quests.

The Demeo aspects of Battlemarked are just as fun and endearing for me as they were the first time I tried the Demeo demo years ago at PAX. Battles can be surprisingly challenging (particularly the boss fights), and at times require clever solutions and strategy to overcome, leading to a sense of satisfaction when a plan you set up comes together. A great example of this was when, during the first main boss fight of Embers of Chaos, a clash against a giant mushroom monster (Myconids for the other D&D and Baldur’s Gate 3 folks out there). I had used the first few of my character turns to set exploding barrels and poison gas clouds up around the boss, and with the final action of my final character, set off a cascading explosion that not only lit up the dungeon in searing flames, but also devastated the boss’s health and minions nearby. Moments like this never got old and always left me with a smirk on my face.

The campaigns themselves are fine affairs with a good mix of intrigue and mystery sprinkled with funny little side quests that remind me of the hijinks I get into with my in-person D&D group. Moments like having to find maple syrup for a sweet-obsessed kobold for his pancakes and right after discovering the grisly remains of a poor girl’s father provide a sort of whiplash that only TTRPG fans and players can relate to and appreciate.

For as rock-solid as the Demeo parts are, I found the D&D parts of Battlemarked to be a bit more of a mixed Bag of Holding. The game brings in different skill checks and moments that allow you to roll not just the Demeo standard D10 dice, but the more recognizable D20. As you navigate the maps, speak with townsfolk, or try to figure something out, prompts can appear that will give you different types of checks that you can attempt, such as sneaking past a sleeping bear or deciphering magical text. In typical D&D fashion, depending on the character you are controlling at the moment the check is being made, you may have some modifiers that help you out, too. Largely, though, while outcomes may result in a trap being sprung or altered dialogue, I don’t recall a moment or example that ever left much of an impression on me. I’m not looking or expecting a Baldur’s Gate 3 level of interaction or decision-making, but a little more impact would be appreciated in future Battlemarked content. I would even settle for some unique dialogue depending on the character I’m using, or referencing my character, but no such luck.

On the topic of characters, it's here where the biggest letdowns can be found. First, let’s start with the good. Characters in Battlemarked consist of staple D&D races and classes, including Bolthrax (Copper Dragonborn Paladin), Ash (Tiefling Rogue), Tibby (Halfling Sorcerer), Jessix (Human Ranger), Tharok (Dwarf Fighter), and Lyria (Elf Bard), each with decks featuring spells and abilities that their class is known for. Fireball included. You can pick and slightly customize a character that will serve as your main character during your quest. These customizations allow you to alter the color palette of components of your character, their name, and, most excitingly, the skill trees that you can progress down.

Each character will always have two dedicated trees. Jessix, for example, will always have her Ranger and Dexterity trees, but you are free to pick your character’s third. These trees consist of five main stats from Dungeons & Dragons — Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, and Charisma — with each having nine skills to work towards, earned by spending points earned during combat in an RPG-lite sort of way. I appreciated this bit of added RPG flair that Battlemarked offers, along with the different weapons you can find during the campaigns, but by and large, I’m really let down by the characters and the lack of options Battlemarked provides.

Attaching a brand like “Dungeons & Dragons” to a game, I feel like there are certain expectations that come with that, such as a fantastical story, interesting characters, and, importantly, the ability to be who you want to be. Battlemarked succeeds in two of those areas, but when it comes to playing your characters, while it may not be a Nat 1 on its roll, it still rolled low. Outside of repeating little quips your characters will spout during combat and a little backstory in their description, I never felt like I could BE a character in Battlemarked.

For a game that doesn’t do much to incorporate the characters into its story, everything is very locked down. As much as I would love Battlemarked to let me select the race and class of my characters separately, I realize that Resolution Games is a smaller studio, and having spoken to Battlemarked’s director Gustav Stenmark earlier this month for the Book 2 reveal, it was out of the scope they could do, but could we have at least gotten the ability to change the gender of the character? Even the color break-up groups left me wanting, as I tried to recreate the player characters of my campaign, and since I couldn’t make a human rogue, the best I could do was a Tiefling with peachy flesh-colored horns, and flesh-colored horns are something I would be fine with if I didn’t ever see them again.

Even with your custom party of adventurers, though, don’t expect to actually be able to use them, at least not all at once. Now, Demeo, being strictly a random dungeon explorer, lends itself well to strictly AI or multiplayer excursions. Battlemarked, though, with its campaigns and more narrative focus, I found myself wanting to play on my own, as I do with nearly all other RPGs I play. In Battlemarked, you can only ever use a single one of your custom characters at a time, filling out the lead character spot in your party. All of the other three possible slots in your four-person party are instead filled with generic versions of the premade characters as “Hireling” versions of themselves.

Hirelings don’t gain skill points. Hirelings don’t have those cool skill trees you can level up. They don’t even match the custom characters you have that are the same character. This means that if you want to level up different characters, you will need to level up each character, by themselves, in a party of generic hireling-controllable characters. I can’t overstate how badly this feels and how much this bummed me out. Spending time trying to make my D&D game’s characters in Battlemarked, only to realize that I was forced to pick one to play and instead use underpowered and generic versions (versions that you can’t even change the colors of) instead? Come on now.

This is all exacerbated by the feeling I was left with that the story made me feel like my party was more a party of no-named soldiers that happened to be there than the heroes sent to deliver the people from harm. My Bolthrax hireling didn’t feel or was represented as though he was a noble paragon of Bahamut, but just someone filling the boots of the paladin role. I can’t think of another video game sporting the D&D logo that feels quite so restrictive when it comes to your player character as Battlemarked does, which is a shame.

As a Demeo game, Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is a 9/10 game for me. Everything I loved about the previous Demeo games is here and feels as good as ever, from the tough-yet-simple strategy to how varied one class feels from another, and how easy it is to play with friends, regardless of platform. New features like the skill trees and the narrative elevate it even higher than its predecessors, and I would love to see them in a full-blown Demeo 2 one day. That said, things like the character issues I mentioned, the somewhat underwhelming impacts of skill checks, and some bugs I encountered (including one that deleted my save file and one that caused my dice to roll misses 13 times in a row) leave a sour taste in my mouth.

I don’t see myself uninstalling Demeo or Demeo Battlemarked from my Quest 3 anytime soon. Battlemarked still offers enough incentives and goodies to make me want to reach for it over the others, and it's an absolute blast to play with friends. That said, though, I only hope that future updates or expansions can cast “Cure Wounds” on those issues I have, and it can be the legend that I know it can be.