Demon Turf (PS5)

In the collect-a-thon platformer Demon Turf, the levels you travel through to collect the valuable batteries and sweets don’t just happen to have these important collectables. The stages are all part of a gang’s turf, and to prove you have the stuff necessary to take on the boss in charge and supplant them, you’re essentially raiding their turf and plundering its valuables. While you’ll find the guys in charge of these places tend to be things like giant hermit crabs or a pair of robotic dragons, all you are is a little imp named Beebz with a lot of pluck and a kappa named Midgi on your side. Luckily though, so few seem willing to believe Beebz has a chance that they rarely stand in her way, this 3D platformer more about the obstacle course level design than much direct conflict with the gangs you’re up against.

 

Standing at the top of the power structure in the Demon World is the Demon King himself, and after taunting Beebz in her dream, he manages to spur her to stop just talking tough and head out into the four main realms of his domain to overthrow the bosses in charge of the turfs. As a demon herself, Beebz has a few special tricks for navigating, able to transform into a bat form for an extra jump in the air and a squid shape when she needs to travel underwater. However, her movement is made a bit more interesting with the way you can mix your jumps to suit different needs. If you do a normal jump, bat jump, and then a mid-air twirl, you can travel upward a fair bit and then adjust to land on your target. If something is far away though, you can instead jump, do the twirl, and then jump again for a far-flinging leap that’s a bit harder to control. A backwards flip can give you a higher starting jump and you can often find room to set it up, and wall jumps will give you yet another tool for better augmenting how your most vital movement techniques can open up some more challenging exploration. While these are the basic abilities before you face off with the bosses and unlock some new skills, your jump options are already a satisfying and sound means of making movement in Demon Turf open to unique challenges.

However, while movement is clean and allows players to sometimes find tricks around the intended travel path if they’re creative, you almost will never enjoy your time spent in battle. This is, in part, because of Demon Turf’s unique art direction. While this is a 3D platformer with a full range of movement, Beebz and other characters are 2D hand drawn images. While this might make moving sound difficult, a helpful circular shadow and the camera perspective causing characters to shift to match seem to actually make judging distance and landing as intended fairly natural. Where things get a little rough is how actions beyond jumping are handled. Beebz’s main attack is an energy punch she can charge up and unleash as a large hand that pushes enemies away. Beebz can only be killed by falling out of the level or touching specific red objects and enemies most often have those same weaknesses, so a fight is often about bullying each other into touching red dangers or falling out of the arena. Aiming your energy punches is unfortunately tied to your camera angle meaning if you want to attack a foe to Beebz’s side or one behind her you have to rotate your perspective entirely, and already the basic punches are so weak that charge pushes are the main means to success. So the occasional mandatory battle will involve whipping the camera around, slow attack charging, and even after you launch your attack, the enemies can bounce around in odd ways as the game seems to detect slightly off attack angles too readily and to its detriment. This gets more apparent when you’re deflecting attacks that are sometimes the only way to hurt something like a boss, the player often needing to volley back an attack and it can sometimes be hard to even spot the reflected projectile to know if you did so successfully.

 

Beebz being mostly invincible does mean you can often push through the little scuffles in a level and most boss encounters do at least have more going on than what amounts to sumo. Boss fights are often even highlights as you learn a new tool you’re given at the start and some platforming and power use is put into focus over simple push fights. Some of these tools like the snake transformation are smart additions, it allowing you to roll up into a fast rolling wheel, but the later ones can be a bit touchy. The time slow power especially feels weak in its design, it only really having a few specific moments it is required and yet the objects it interacts with sometimes struggle to slow down properly. The slow power only effects a certain radius, meaning objects like a spinning fan can sometimes enter and exit it in odd ways that make their movement jerky and unreliable despite the game making it so there shouldn’t really be room for error in slowing it. The time slow is the last ability granted and ones like a hookshot to easily get to high areas are far better handled, but Demon Turf does start burning through some of its goodwill the longer you play it.

 

One rather intriguing system in Demon Turf is how the game handles mid-level checkpoints. Beyond one at a level’s start, you are granted the ability to place three more flags pretty much anywhere there is stable ground, the player asked to make judgment calls on if an area they cleared was hard and they want to avoid having to do it over or try to press on to place one later down the line to make sure any potential failures would set them back even less. There are definitely levels designed with some pretty clear places to put down your checkpoint flags and you’re even able to teleport between them in case you missed optional collectibles like the hidden sweets. However, as you get deeper in the game, stages do start to have longer gauntlets to clear and more than just three easy spots to place a flag for safety’s sake. This does give this system some depth, and while Demon Turf mixes up its design with some more exploratory open levels or clear linear stages, the flags feel like they can fit into either design approach. Where it’s not quite a good idea though are the levels where Demon Turf indulges in some rougher ideas of what constitutes a good jumping challenge. Waiting on slow moving platforms is a drag in a game where you can otherwise find fast tricks to move forward and yet Demon Turf leans on these fairly often, even putting multiple in a row over a deadly drop. There are times where you might want to place a flag not because you just cleared a legitimately tough challenge but because all of the slow waiting is not something you want to do again, and then if your flag reserves run dry when you find more of those slow platform trials ahead, it starts to make you wonder what the level’s appeal is even meant to be.

Demon Turf isn’t lacking in good and engaging levels though. While the game does have a bad habit of sometimes casting a level in a single dull color that can make it a bit drab, it also has a range of area concepts that make levels stand out aesthetically and in terms of layout. One stage might have you traveling through a city, figuring out ways into buildings or onto rooftops to find the keys you need to proceed. Another is instead a relaxed beach environment with some breezy but frequent jumping challenges. You can find yourself in a canyon in the middle of a whirlwind, skiing in a resort run by robots, or hopping between moving subway trains, and perhaps unsurprisingly, more conceptual levels are less likely to indulge in the game’s weaker sins like strings of slow platform rides. Demon Turf can be outright excellent when it’s letting you embrace your movement abilities, and while the hidden sweets give you something extra to poke around for, it is comforting to know you can just try to find your way to the level exit where the battery awaits since it gives some forward direction to occasionally intricate level shapes. A rather odd choice is made to increase the game’s level count though. There are 28 levels to be found in the four turfs, but after you beat an area’s boss, you unlock Second Trip versions of each stage. While these sound like attempts to recycle level layouts, many of these can feel quite different from their earlier versions. Sometimes it’s the direction you take in a level, other times hazards are swapped out, and focusing on different powers or even barely used environmental pieces can make some stages feel entirely different on the revisit. You do need to do Second Trips to finish the game, the final boss requiring 50 of 56 total batteries to reach, but the Second Trips also add collectible lollipops more regularly through their design too so there’s even a different pace as you collect things more regularly rather than only when finding special areas.

 

Demon Turf is teeming with optional content in general though, some even outshining the stages featured in the main adventure. One such area are the mini challenges which are levels built purely around getting the most out of your movement abilities or exploring certain mechanics like platforms that disappear or reappear based on your jumps in condensed but difficult stages. You do have the ill-advised inclusion of some battle arena challenges, but Demon Soccer Golf’s small selection of ball pushing stages actually feel manageable despite leaning on your pushing attack. There are photography quests that get you to look around hub areas and stages for odd and interesting sights, but the game cartridges you find are a really strange but interesting collectible. These cartridges unlock eight bonus levels based on stages from Super Mario games, copying their designs rather flagrantly albeit with Demon Turf’s enemies and assets. Some like a reproduction of Tick Tock Clock from Super Mario 64 at least add a new wrinkle with some rising lava to get you moving faster through such a vertical level, but otherwise it’s more an interesting look at how Beebz’s movement compares to that of platforming’s biggest mascot.

 

Those sweets you collect in main stages can be redeemed for new colors for Beebz’s hair and clothes as well as pets that ride her head as she explores. The best use for sweets though has to be the Mods, these increasing your abilities a bit like giving you an extra bat jump, allowing you to activate a reflective shield with a spin, or giving small boosts like slower fall speed or faster walking. Beebz does feel like a bit of a slow walker in spaces that are often fairly large, but one unfortunate touch about Mods is you only have so many equipment spots and more useful mods can fill up multiple spots. While some like an extra bat jump should have reasonably been limited, it also keeps you from embracing Mods fully despite how helpful some could have been to paying off the extra work you put in. Like a few too many things in Demon Turf, it’s a good idea but with conditions attached that make things a bit less entertaining than they should have been.

THE VERDICT: Demon Turf provides some excellent movement techniques that really gets to shine in its more imaginative levels and bonus challenges, but a range of other half-baked ideas dull the enthusiasm you’ll have for exploring the turfs. Combat almost always feels sloppy even during the otherwise interesting boss fights and the unique checkpoint placing system is harmed by the game often leaning on areas that are a chore to repeat if you don’t place your flags right. Demon Turf is quite good when it has a clear idea for how to lay out a stage but then feels like it meanders in levels with weaker direction, the game an odd mix of clean traversal and fiddly gimmicks that make it hard to condemn it or recommend it.

 

And so, I give Demon Turf for PlayStation 5…

An OKAY rating. Yawn-inducing waits on a sequence of slow moving but still difficult jumping challenges give way to exhilarating high speed tests of your movement prowess. Push matches where aiming is rough break up interesting level concepts that ask for engaging and involved exploration. You want to praise the parts of the game where Demon Turf clearly has a strong vision for what a level should provide, and then you’re dragged down when another stage leans on the weak time slow power or feels like its testing your patience on purpose. Even the wealth of extra content that could almost be praised still trots out some combat challenges than leans into the game’s weaknesses, and it really becomes hard to emphasize that Demon Turf does probably have more successful and interesting ideas than poor ones. A good baseball player is going to strike out at bat sometimes so it’s not like a video game having some rough patches should preclude it from praise either, and it feels bad to say the overall experience is merely decent because there are definitely times it shows a strong understanding of good stage design and satisfying controls. Demon Turf needed the self control not to dabble into ideas that had weak potential though, because bringing things to a halt for some bland push combat almost never works out here and is likely the first taste you’ll have of the game’s sometimes clumsy challenge concepts. Push combat relying on a charge attack that can only be aimed in the direction your camera angle is facing is probably the heart of why battle never works well, perhaps having something like the deflection spin mod be standard on top of a fast firing push at least making normal encounters more tolerable would help. Mods in general could have patched up some of the weaknesses if they were more free to embrace, but thinning out the levels without much thought put into their design could have kept things clean and consistent, especially if the time slow power was made to just work in the relevant spots rather than trying to be flexible and failing when it’s actually required.

 

Demon Turf will definitely please some 3D platforming fans. Its strong style endears with a hip-hop soundtrack and some fun comedic elements, and the extra content can even outshine the main adventure quite often. There are levels that are a joy to traverse or really give you room to play with your powers while others know how to limit your options to make the turf a bit tough. Demon Turf could have been a full enough experience with just its effective elements, but a few too many times spent dipping into its weak areas means if you don’t keep your expectations in check, Demon Turf can disappoint. Ultimately it can feel like pushing past the rough patches is worth it, but not quite enough so to earn it the level of praise it would have deserved if it knew where its limits lie.