Review by: Brandon "Artifact Weapon" Cackowski-Schnell

How's that joke go? What time is it when your doctor cuts a hole in your brain to help stop dreams of demonic attackers? Time to get a new doctor! Ha! Wait, that's not it. Anyway, such is the plight of William Redmoor, beset by madness in the original Dementium: The Ward and operated on by the enigmatic Doctor in hopes of relieving the visions that plagued him. Unfortunately the operation didn't go all that well and William is back in the Bright Dawn Treatment Center, apparently as loony as ever.

The previous Dementium game was a technical success however some glaring design decisions stood in the way of it being truly enjoyable. Luckily most of these issues have been addressed, or mitigated in some way for the sequel allowing the creepy, dread filled shooter to provide some unsettling moments without tripping over itself. Gone is the horrible save system, replaced with a combination of auto-saves at key moments and manual save points that also double as health restoring stations. Mostly gone are the respawning enemies that made exploration and backtracking such a chore in the first outing. Monsters still respawn at times, however it's not so much a respawn of old beasties but a new selection of creatures to kill in certain backtracking instances. Between the lack of respawning and the save points, getting Redmoor to the end of his journey in one piece is made much, much easier.

You'll have a much larger and more varied selection of weapons helping you out this time around too. The buzzsaw makes its triumphant return and is joined by other melee weapons like a shank and a sledgehammer as well as various guns, a flamethrower and eventually a nailgun and a boomerang-esque artifact weapon. All of the weapons are modeled well and have distinct benefits and disadvantages based on the enemies you're facing. The plentiful melee selection is a nice touch for when ammo is running low, however ammo is plentiful provided you take the time to explore a little.

This is a good thing as the selection of enemies has also grown. From shambling zombies with giant Venus fly-trap mouths in their chests to laughing, two headed dog things that spit acid at you, the designers at Renegade Kid clearly had some fun coming up with unsettling and varied creature designs. Some of the boss encounters fall into the usual traps of repetition that you find in shooters, but the foot soldiers are a fantastically creepy lot.

The game serves up plenty of moody, macabre environments to traverse filled with lots of bloody, violent imagery that looks ripped straight out of Clive Barker's imagination. At times the real world will turn into a strange dream world, seemingly from another dimension where you'll have to fight off waves of attackers until William regains his senses. You'll spend a lot of time backtracking, too much really, which impedes the flow the game but at least it gives you the opportunity to visit the save points (conveniently marked on your map) or forage for health pills and ammo.

At four to five hours for the single player, the game isn't terribly long, however by the end when it becomes somewhat clear what the Doctor's true intentions are, and the set up for the inevitable sequel occurs it's hard to feel shortchanged. Folks looking to keep on killing can do so in the game's challenge mode or fire up another game on a higher difficulty level. Horror is hard to pull off on a handheld to begin with where all of the mundane aspects of the real world are pulling at your peripheral vision and keeping the dramatic tension high over the course of 10 or twelve hours is harder still, so in going with a shorter story length, Renegade Kid does a good job of getting you in, making with the scares and getting out. Folks looking for a different, decidedly mature experience in handheld gaming will find that Dementium II is just what the doctor ordered.