Thank You ChiliDog Interactive for submitting through our Steam Curator!

Note: Demonic Supremacy shares a lot of assets with another game on Steam called Cemetary Warrior V. The developers have confirmed that Demonic Supremacy is a remake/reimagining of the former made by the same team, but under a different publisher.

Every 3000 years or so, a strange building called the Infernal Tower appears on Earth. And to stop the impending demonic invasion, a “chosen one” is selected and granted demonic power to climb up the ladder and confront the Lord of Hell while slaying as many hellspawn as they can. I guess it must be a “fight fire with fire” situation.

Demonic Supremacy is a retro-inspired 3D arena shooter developed and published by ChiliDog Interactive. In fact, this is ChiliDog Interactive’s first developed game, at least according to the Steam page. It’s so retro that the game doesn’t even have a jump button. The tight, compressed areas and lack of jumping remind me of old-school shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, despite visually being more in common with Painkiller (another 3D shooter).

50 levels in all, with various conditions in each level, Demonic Supremacy is quick to pick up, play, and stop at a moment's notice. Some levels will start you with only the shotgun and no additional weapons. Other levels may have all weapons available to you, but you can’t afford to get hit even once. Each level with their differences does prevent the experience from being too stale in that regard.

Your character has five weapons in total, with only the shotgun being available for every level, as it is your default weapon. It has great range contrary to other video game shotguns, and infinite ammo. The shotgun itself feels good to shoot with its booming sound effects and it reloads three bullets at a time, so down time is infrequent. But the problem with the shotgun is that it’s by far the best weapon in the game. Usually, guns with infinite ammo are something that is used as a backup, but the other weapons have too many flaws that you rely on the shotgun most of the time. The minigun shoots fast, but it does such low damage that it even struggles to kill the weakest enemies. The plasma gun is slow and inaccurate. The grenade launcher acts more like a rocket launcher, which tripped me up a few times, and it has the same problems as the plasma gun. By the time the projectile reaches its area, the enemies will most likely have moved out of the way by then. At least you take zero splash damage so it can act as a bit of a “panic button”. Finally, we have the BFG that has a charge time but kills anything that comes into its path. Since it is Demonic Supremacy’s BFG, you don’t come across it often.

Certain abilities that you have are some sort of demonic shout pushing back and stunning enemies, a short-range dash, and a powerful area-of-effect that will disable and kill all enemies within a certain radius. Unfortunately, it only charges up when killing enemies (or by picking a specific power-up) and it really isn’t all that useful because of its short range. With multiple options that already exist for some form of crowd control, the AoE ability should have been a full-screen wipe to warrant the restrictions placed on it. I would find myself almost never using it in battle due to how strict its usage is. However, if you're experiencing difficulty, you can click a menu at the top right of the level select screen and buy temporary upgrades that grant you additional ammo or a second chance at life after a fatal hit.

While Demonic Supremacy starts nicely, the gameplay loop exhausts itself quickly because of the enemy and level design. Enemies express extremely poor phonological awareness as they typically only make sounds when they spawn and when they attack. There will be many moments where you get attacked from behind and you have less than half a second to react to it. Another strange mechanic is your stamina meter due to how it does not work in the ways you’d expect it to. You have a toggle to run (shift key by default) but once you run out of energy, instead of the run toggle being disabled so you can regenerate stamina, it still drains the bar so you’ll be kept at zero stamina until you manually toggle it off. I would say that this is the worst feeling aspect of Demonic Supremacy and should be a rather easy fix to implement in a future update.

Due to the lack of a jump button, levels are designed in a very “box-like format”. You’ll quickly realize that the most efficient method of clearing most levels is just walking along the outer edge of the area and kite enemies until you win. These rather short levels tend to feel long because of their repetitive nature. Dying feels like such a setback because of this, even though you’re only losing up to 4 minutes at most with each death.

Hit detection and registration are also inconsistent, leading to inconsistent damage. I can hit enemies in the exact same spot in the head and it seems like it’s all up to random chance whether the enemy gets killed in one hit, or they take four or more shots to die. You can almost never come up with a strategy due to this. And once you start getting to jumping enemies, hitting them in the air is almost impossible as their hitbox more or less disappears. Sometimes I’m able to hit them but it’s not worth going for it.

I do, however, like the visuals even if they aren’t what you will call good from a technical standpoint. The combination of corporate offices and hellish landscapes complement each other surprisingly well. Is this some sort of “social commentary?” That’s something you’ll have to ask the developer, not me. The demons themselves look out of this world too and I appreciate their designs.

Many of the sound effects in Demonic Supremacy are stock sounds or free use, because there is definitely a lion’s roar in the game that I’ve heard from somewhere else. While I don’t listen to heavy metal (despite actually liking the genre) there’s a nice sense of energy that the music provides to the setting. It makes sense that heavy metal attaches itself to fast-paced shooters due to the thick sounds of the instruments and the general loudness. Now if only the sound effects from the enemies were on par with the music and other sound effects…

Moral warnings and concerns are few, but also very obvious. The most apparent aspects are the violence and the demonic imagery. The violence is like many high-content violent shooters. Enemies tend to explode in gibs when dying. Not every enemy, however. Some just have a generic fiery explosion. With the demonic imagery, it’s everywhere with some more “traditional looking devils” as an enemy type, and all the bosses spawn out of a giant inverted pentagram.

I didn’t complete every level in Demonic Supremacy, but I’ve played enough that my opinion would not change if I ever do beat it. People who have issues or concerns with demonic imagery will avoid this anyway even before getting into the violent content. I cannot recommend Demonic Supremacy to most despite its cheap price because the gameplay loop cannot keep a person’s interest for the run time. It sure as heck didn’t retain mine for long. For what seems to be ChiliDog Interactive’s first developed (not published) game according to Steam, it really isn’t a bad first attempt. With some refinements made to the gameplay and some future updates, who knows— maybe ChiliDog Interactive will make a liar out of me.