Demon’s Crystals review

The Devil lies in the details, and in this case, those details are microscopic and barely visible.

You put one half of a third-person shooter with another half of a bullet hell shooter, and you mix it up with an endless Horde mode, and you get Demon’s Crystals. It’s got interesting anime characters you choose at the very start, the graphics are reasonably detailed, colorful and vivid enough to look like a Pixar movie on a tight budget, levels are small, well-designed arenas, you get a story mode, survival mode and a handful of multiplayer modes of play, and the best thing of all is that this game costs a pint of beer. So from a get go Demon’s Crystals get a solid recommendation for me with a big caveat, which I’ll get to it soon.

You are greeted with a wall of text spewing out a nonsensical story which you’ll forget in 3.333 seconds. Basically the empire of demons, who spent all their time lollygagging and chasing crystals instead of slaying humans, have met their match in an undead horde hell bent of taking all their crystals, candies and lands. That’s all you need to know about the story, and no, there is no chance in hell anyone is going to spoil the surprises this “story” has.

In a story mode you fight through small levels filled to the brim with all manner of undead nasties who will try to stop you dead in tracks. Some of them are big and slow but hit hard, other shoot projectiles in a specific manner; a few cast radius spells that damage anyone close enough. You either kill X amount of enemies to get to the next level, or you pick up XXX amount of crystals, or you do both. After a dozen or so levels, you get to the big boss you have to defeat, and this modus operandi keeps repeating a couple of times till you finish the story mode. Every level is exponentially tougher than the last, which is remedied with your character leveling up in time and getting stronger (yes, you’ll have to do some grinding, but it never gets excessive or annoying). Characters you choose differ only in the color of their projectiles. Survival mode is there to see how long you’ll last and where you’ll land in leaderboards. Multiplayer modes are useless since no one is playing it, so unless you get a kleptomaniac friend or two to join up, you can forget about multiplayer.

Now the big caveat I mentioned in the beginning is the color palette: levels are drenched too much in red color and your mouse pointer you use to shoot badies is also red, so when projectiles start flying from all directions and monsters come pouring from every hole in the ground, you won’t be able to see that mouse pointer anymore and where you’re shooting. In fact, at times there are too much stuff happening on screen, each armed with graphical effects, that you won’t be able to see what in the Lucifer’s name is going on. This is a big oversight and I’m frankly surprised developers didn’t fix this already.

All in all, Demon’s Crystals is a decent bullet hell, budget horde game and I’m eager to see what developers can do next. It’s alright, but nothing memorable. You could do better for a fiver, but you could do a hell of a lot worse.

Review:

+ Nice little Game
+ Challenging
+ Shooting, Moving, Bullethell Weapons
+ Nice Soundtrack
+ Great and changing leveldesign


- all chars basically the same
- cant level above 90 XD (that was really quick)


A nice little game somewhat challenging, i broke up near the end, cause i am too old for 832179423742 bullets and enemys on the screens. but its fun nonethelesss 80%

This has been sitting in my library collecting dust for years and I figured I would give it a go finally. Overall it's a pretty basic indie twin-stick shooter with very little depth, but I honestly wasn't expecting much from a $3 game from 2016 with barely any updates. I did have a little bit of fun, but it was very short lived as the game felt very repetitive after about 40 minutes or so. From my understanding one of the strongest points of the game is it's co-op, however I only played solo, so my review is for the single player experience. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but it's not something I would recommend. There's a good amount of twin shooters out there that are just way better than this for either the same price or around the same price.

My wife and I like to play twin-stick shooters... except this one. The music is good--has a sort of whimsyvania feel to it--and the character concepts aren't bad, but the game is virtually unplayable when you combine all the problems:

1. Certain enemies, such as the exploding giant zombies, are overpowered and conveniently spawn adjacent to you.
2. The map is full of visual clutter, which makes moving around the many obstacles on each map rather difficult. (Increasing the qraphics quality only increases the clutter.)
3. There seems to be absolutely no point to increases one's character level. (My character was over level 40 when we stopped playing, and I cannot tell any difference between that and level 1.)
4. At least one of the power-ups is actually a detriment: It just makes your shots spiral around you in an uncontrollable, hurricane-cloud-like pattern.
5. Weapon damage is generally underpowered, given the number of enemies that can dominate the screen at times.
6. The camera angle is really bad. It's too northward-facing. It should be focused more downward.

Overall, the game is frustrating. We completed about 60% of it when we decided to forfeit, and we'll probably never return to it--which is a shame, because as a fan of both twin-stick shooters and Castlevania games (and my wife is a huge Tim Burton fan), I really wanted this game to be good. :(

Demon’s Crystals is a twin stick shooter. It has demon’s and well, crystals which you must collect in order to save the world. It’s a very simple yet fun top down shooter.

Graphics:

Even though the game has a top down view, the game looks gorgeous in my opinion. Colors and the art-style really stands out. There’s something about this type of graphics which really appeals to the eyes. I had no problems with performance in this game and I was constantly getting over a 100 FPS throughout the whole time I played the game.

Sound:

Music is okay, it’s nothing great but it’s not bad as well. I’d say it’s your average sound track. I think the music could be better.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is your average twin stick shooter. You have 4 characters to choose from at the start and can play the game on normal, hard or nightmare mode. Every character has their own unique weapons so you may want to test them all out and choose the one which suits your playstyle best. Gameplay itself is pretty simple, you use WASD to move around the map and right click to shoot. Where ever your cursor is at in the game the player will shoot there. There’s all sorts of enemies which attack you, zombies, evil trees, skeletons, bats, ghosts etc.

Your goal is to collect crystals and as you collect crystals you also level up. Throughout the levels upgrades and other power ups spawn randomly and you can collect these to make your levels easy. Most of your gun pickups give you different patterns and spreads of your bullets. Levels consist of waves (or Hordes as they’re called in-game) of enemies and you must kill them and collect the crystals. Some levels have you kill a certain number of enemies, so the missions vary from level to level.

There’s also a survival mode where you have to survive as long as possible. The game can also be played with friends so there’s also the co-op factor which can always be fun. A short video of the gameplay can be found below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=695898749

Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 6/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Overall: 8/10

Conclusion:

Very fun twin stick shooter. Graphics are beautiful in my opinion and gameplay is pretty fun as well. If you plan on playing this with friends, you will really enjoy it. I think the price to fun ratio is pretty good in this game, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth.

Play as sexy demon girls, who become cute demon chibi girls while you fight a bunch of evil zombies. Demon's Crystals is a twin-stick shooter with an isometric camera, pretty common but well made.
https://youtu.be/NLLB8KFJMHo

Sickest arcade game ever. After reading the reviews on it I almost did not buy it. I found it on sale once, now I regret I didnt pay full price. AAA title. Dont listen to the reviews, just buy it. Its got local coop as in twin stick shooter style, two controllers two players on one machine. Bright arcade like craziness with good mechanics, a game your personal computer needs to be an entertainment machine. Highly Recommend.

I agree with alot of other reviews on here, this game gets boring very fast. Within 20 minutes or so. Not enough originaility to make this enjoyable. Don't waste your time.

4/10

Really fun game in local coop. Very simple mechanics, that are easy to learn, but hard to master. But boring as hell in normal difficulty.
Many people do not recommend this game because of repetative gameplay. This might be true, if you play it alone or on normal mode.
Games like this are only fun if they are challenging, so do yourself a favour and play this game in hard mode!

As others have mentionned, you should buy this on sale as it takes as little as 2 hours to complete the game on normal difficulty. All four characters play the same and there are only two types of levels (three if you include boss fights).

At 2$, it's a pretty good game, even better if you've got friends over.