An ambitious build upon an already successful DoTA without being a mere copy.
PLEASE NOTE: While this game is an ambitious improvement upon the original concept behind DoTA, this is NOT a DoTA copy. Unfortunately, to give a truly proper account of the game, I will have to compare it to DoTA, as much as I do not want to.
As stated above, Demigod's original concept was inspired by DoTA. The basic premise of the game is that one of the gods of the pantheon has fallen, and a tournament is being held to determine which demigod will take his place. A simple, yet satisfactory story for this game. The story gives sufficient meaning and purpose to the hours of gameplay you will put into this game.
In the main campaign (or Tournament, as it is called) you, selecting one of the eight demigods, fight in eight rounds, trying to collect the most favor points. If your character has the highest favor points at the end of the eight rounds, your demigod is selected to take the fallen god's place. One can acquire favor points in many ways. For instance, collecting a significant amount of gold, killing many enemy demigods, having few deaths, killing many grunts (creeps in DoTA), etc. So, losing a single match by no means ruins your chances of successfully completing a full tournament.
The beauty of this concept is that you do not need to be the winner of every single match to win the tournament. This eliminates the stress of playing a forty-five minute match and losing at the last second, only to have to restart the match. Similarly, on average, you will fight on teams with 2-3 other AI demigods. I personally find one-on-one matches boring and slow, so I believe this to be a wonderful decision by the creators.
There are four types of gameplay in Demigod. The first is Conquest, were one's team tries to destroy the enemy team's Citadel (similar to DoTA). The second is Dominate, were one's team attains victory through capturing and hold strategic points for a certain amount of time. Next is Slaughter, were the team who kills a certain amount of the enemy Demigods first wins. And lastly Fortress, where the first team to destroy the enemy's fortresses wins.
The graphics are smooth and beautiful. Each map is wonderfully designed and characters are greatly detailed. There are very few (if any) technical issues with this game (at least I haven't come across any). When there are, perhaps, a massive number of units for each force on the field later in each matches, the frame rate will sometimes slow down slightly, but not enough to cause any trouble or to become obnoxious.
The control scheme is very simple, yet effective. It's a simple point-and-click style game, with a few hot-button commands on the keyboard.
Overall, this game, while inspired by DoTA, is a wholly unique and ambitious title that builds upon the already incredible fun Warcraft mod, to make a game well worth a look.
PROS:
Improving upon DoTA's single map, multiple Demigod maps create a unique and varied game experience every time one plays online or in single player match.
Intelligent AI makes even playing alone a fun and challenging experience.
Multiple game modes make the already varied gameplay even more varied.
Wonderfully detailed graphics.
Absolutely zero game bugs (as far as I have seen in my multiple hours of play).
Wide variety of items (not as much as DoTA but certainly more meaningful and less complicated).
Depending on the player, small learning curve (hardest part, similar to DoTA, is figuring out which items work best with your character and play style).
Developers constantly maintaining the game with updates (I literally have to download updates for this game every other day).
CONS:
Only eight different characters to choose from (I was hesitant to put this as a con considering that Stardock has already announced that downloadable content is scheduled to be released regularly introducing new characters and maps).
Only eight maps (Same as above).
Possibly slight frame rate reduction.
Sometimes multiplayer connection issues (though the developers have already released a patch that fixed most major bugs).