Now and again, we all grow a little nostalgic thinking of the games we used to play. Be they Diablo, Paper Mario, or, for me, Warcraft III, it’s fun to go back and play them again. Of course, we wouldn’t want to play them exclusively (modern games have made some improvements, after all!) but it is refreshing to note the highlights and draw parallels to the good in modern gaming, as well as the bad.
Enter Return 2 Games, a series planning to pay homage to seven retro titles with seven modern interpretations. The first of these, Book of Demons ($4.99), channels the visual style of Paper Mario into a hack & slash dungeon crawler on rails. While it isn’t exactly Diablo, it is quite a bit of fun, and no slouch when it comes to replayability.
While it clearly uses Diablo as an inspiration, Book of Demons doesn’t actually play very much like Diablo at all. Sure, there are hordes of enemies to slaughter, tons of different equipment to collect, a handful of different classes, and a range of difficulties, but actual gameplay is pretty different. Levels, for example, are far less open. Players are restricted to following a track with enemies approaching from all sides, and they must occasionally backtrack or hurry forward to avoid abilities or ranged attacks.
Movement isn’t all that’s different, though. All characters are “ranged" characters, in the sense that they can attack just about anything on the screen, no matter whe...