Demigod

My friend sent me a preview for a relatively interesting game called Demigod last night - why did it catch his/our attention? It's at least partially inspired by a map from Warcraft 3 called "DotA," which stands for Defense of the Ancients.

The game lets you play as a Demigod who's fighting for the honor of becoming a full fledged god. There are two major groupings for the Demigods, one called "Generals" which sounds like it'll play a bit more like an RTS, and one called "Assassin" which seems to be more like a 3rd person shooter/RPG. I'm curious as to how the two will do against each other, whether either type will have a significant advantage. For instance, since it sounds like you don't personally aim the General Demigods attacks, does that mean any time it attacks you all shots hit? Or are you able to dodge, at which point the question arises, how will the general EVER hit you if he has no control over his projectiles? I'm really crossing my fingers that they'll find a good balance between the two Demigod groupings, as admittedly, I'm looking forward to this game.

Just looking at some of the preview pictures on IGN (Article here, images here) makes me want to learn how to do bump mapping, because these are some beautiful models in my opinion. Graphically speaking, I already like this game. I think it still needs a little polishing here and there to make it truly perfect, but all in all, it looks really good where it's at now. I'm especially impressed with some of the effects, and just hoping those aren't just going to be serious lag makers. Who knows, maybe my future computer upgrade will be enough to keep lag out of most games. Here's hoping!

And speaking of hoping, here's one hope I have... that they have a unit that's reminiscent of the "Goblin Techies" in the DotA maps, they're my favorite little buggers... mostly because they're hilarious.
Their abilities are...
Land Mine - places a land mine that blows up when an enemy steps on it/goes near it.
Explosion - Blows up the techies causing massive damage to nearby enemies.
Stun Ward - Drops a ward which will stun nearby enemies when they activate it (this ability seems a bit... out of character... in my opinion. Still quite useful though.)
and their ultimate - Remote Mines - Which allow you to manually detonate them to deal more... accurate damage.

These guys are arguably the strongest and weakest in the game... why is that? Their spells have incredible surprise value, and if the techies take the time to set up traps, they can take down even the most powerful of tanks, though, the Gorgon is always tough with her overpowered mana shield...
So, with all this obvious power, how can they be weak? Simple. A SINGLE ITEM in this game renders the majority of the techie's abilities completely useless. Either the Gem of Trueseeing or the Revealing Wards (Not sure if those names are right, this is going from memory, and I never buy those items ^_^;;) both allow you to see invisible units - which includes the techie's mines.
Once even ONE enemy hero has these items, it renders a large amount of strategies useless, and the only way to get the jump on hero's like these is to place the mines at the top of a ramp, so that the fog of war will cover them until they're already on them... and even that is difficult to do, since they have shared vision with the mini-minions the computer controls, and those guys are always leading the front as the generic cannon fodder.

Ah well, if they don't have a similar character in Demigod, at least I can look forward to going back to DotA with the techies, running towards an enemy, yelling "HUUUUG!" and blowing myself into pieces, taking them and a few random NPC's with me.
So much hilarity ensues when the techie's are about.