These days, 3D platformers are a rare breed, and every time we get a new one that slaps, it tends to root itself into the public consciousness for decades. That said, it’s incredibly difficult to make a great 3D platformer, but that’s exactly what Demon Tides has been desperately trying to do.
It’s a very large, open-world 3D platformer made in a similar style of gameplay to Bowser’s Fury, which was structured in such a unique way that you’ll still see people begging for a sequel five years later. Fabraz, the developer behind Bubsy 4D and Demon Turf, appears to be up to the challenge, though.
They wear their inspirations like a badge of honor, and you can tell that Demon Tides was made from a place of passion just by looking at the promotional material for it. That said, passion alone doesn’t guarantee a game’s quality, and going all in on making a game be just like your favorites can be a devilish gambit.
I’m an avid enjoyer of all of Demon Tides’ biggest inspirations, and that makes me feel especially qualified to pick it apart. I want to discuss exactly how this game ticks, where it works, and where some things tend to fall apart in the ocean voyage ahead.
Somewhat Smooth Sailing
If you’re one to think that the thing that matters most in a platformer is the movement, then you’ll likely begin one half of a love/hate relationship with Demon Tides immediately. Every move you have flows into every other part of your moveset in such a smooth way that it simply feels fun to run around and dash boost jump across gaps.
That said, despite how good it feels to control, it doesn’t look anywhere near as good. Every animation feels like it has about 10 extra frames of startup compared to the move you’re pulling off, and it’s the source of a very strange disconnect between what the game is showing and what you’re doing.
This lack of visual clarity when it comes to animations bleeds through just about every single character animation, and is pretty emblematic of a lack of visual quality that you’ll see through the entire game, as things get pretty rough as soon as you get control of your character.
The camerawork is really sloppy, even during cutscenes, and in gameplay, you’re moving the camera manually all the time, to the point of getting frustrating. It can feel really good to pull off a sick string of moves, but I’d frequently find the camera really hated whatever I was doing, and entirely prevented me from seeing.
Even just from the first few minutes, you can already tell this game will be one where you need to ignore a bevy of flaws to get to the good stuff. There is a lot of good here, but it’s all placed under a lens of jank where the camera wants to get stuck inside every model it can find, and I get my checkpoint deleted by the horrible, evil Mr. Mint.
En Route to Success
At the very least, the thing that Demon Tides does absolutely nail is the structure. All the islands are connected via a Zelda-esque great sea, and you get to swim across it in Snake form at quite high speeds. There are a few diversions between islands, which meant the swimming never felt too repetitive.
Once you come ashore, the islands are full of semi-linear platforming segments that usually contain a bunch of Eyetems, the general currency, or more specific collectibles, such as the Golden Gears that are needed to progress the main storyline, something that I only felt mildly invested in.
Any story on these islands consists mainly of disconnected plot points and somewhat interesting developments once you get to the couple of actually story-relevant islands. Once you’re in these cutscenes, it’s usually just various yapping about Ragnar without much happening, or showing off a character that is trying way too hard to be the next Tumblr sexyman.
Outside of their incohesion with the story, these islands all feel wonderfully paced, provide excellent challenges, and work well in situations where you get frustrated with one platforming section in particular, as you can always leave and come back. It’s pretty much every reason why I love Bowser’s Fury, but expanded to a full game.
As far as non-progression rewards go, the Talismans you can get are usually pretty neat, if a bit overpowered. They range from making you move quicker, to giving you more health, and to more unique ones like stopping time for a moment to make moving parts of levels a little easier to navigate.
The entire game isn’t particularly balanced around these Talismans, though. I’ve been able to skip tons of levels by using a combination of extra bat jumps and a vertical spin, but that vertical spin also made any propeller section hell on earth. It doesn’t help that this entire system really strongly reminds me of something, too.
Towing The Line
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. This 3D platformer has a bunch of images you can find around the levels placed by other online players, accessories that augment your abilities, self-contained small levels with an ocean aesthetic, custom hair dyes and outfits as rewards, abilities that include making certain ghostly platforms appear, and one that briefly stops time.
I’m not saying Demon Tides is a carbon copy of A Hat in Time; I’m saying that I could count the genuinely original elements in this game on one hand. To me, it goes past just inspiration, instead doing things in a damn near identical way to games I’ve already played, and it makes the whole thing feel a little derivative.
The transformations in concept are a cool original idea. Still, they essentially amount to your model swapping while you double jump, dive, wall run, and try to use your spin copter, but forget that it will screw over your dash and send you plummeting towards the earth. That one is a skill issue, I’ll admit, but it does still reek of a little lost potential.
The music, at the very least, is genuinely fantastic and is something that could constantly redeem my frustrations at game mechanics blatantly not functioning. It’s like a more serene, but still very engaging take on the music of Sonic Rush and Jet Set Radio, and it especially pops off during boss fights.
Despite these bosses mostly being lame, copy and paste fights where you wait for 30 seconds before attacking the obvious weak spots, the rap track playing during the last phase pumped me up every time. I think I would feel far harsher on the experience as a whole if this soundtrack weren’t so exceptional, as it’s nonstop bangers.
Patched Up Hull
Demon Tides, on the whole, wasn’t exactly my favorite, but it certainly could have been. It feels like Fabraz was stretched far too thin from working on this game alongside Bubsy 4D, and the janky camera, lack of visual polish, and frequent bugs that had me clipping out of bounds at random were all products of that.
Even without that, the game would still feel derivative. The dialogue is often bland, occasionally cringeworthy, and very rarely genuinely funny, and I do doubt that it would have gotten significantly improved by another draft. Everything else, though, feels like it has massive potential and was squandered by time constraints.
I had fun with Demon Tides at times. Namely, in skipping platforming, doing things unintentionally, and actually getting a hang of the movement mechanics. But when the game tries to make me engage with another janky gimmick that usually has me flying off the stage 50% of the time, it can’t help but crush my spirit a little.
I really wanted to love Demon Tides as much as I love Bowser’s Fury, Sonic Frontiers, A Hat in Time, Mario 64, and all of its numerous other inspirations. There are moments where it shines through, and truly does feel like a proper cohesive take that does try to improve on what those games did wrong, and other times, it feels like it’s copying everything they did verbatim.
If nothing else, the soundtrack did leave me enjoying my time, on top of the moments where the game allowed me to play in a way that didn’t feel like I was fistfighting a bear while pushing a rock up a mountain for eternity. If this game does get patched and my complaints get addressed, I would be genuinely overjoyed.
A version of this game with a better camera, with actually thought-through checkpoints that don’t put the onus on the player to make the platforming more enjoyable, and a massive amount of polish would be a genuine 9/10 experience. But as it currently is, I leave disappointed, and only wish this game got more time to cook.
Demon Tides Review
Demon Tides is an ambitious, often janky platformer that does its best to show inspiration from some of the greatest games in the genre, and ends up feeling a little bit bland because of it.
The Good
- Snappy movement that flows really well.
- A well-structured open world full to the brim with platforming challenges.
- An incredibly good soundtrack that I could listen to for hours.
The Bad
- An extreme lack of polish, with jank and bugs and out-of-bounds clips around every corner.
- Cringeworthy dialogue and a story that rarely gets very interesting.
- A frustrating camera and level gimmicks that don't work really well.
