Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked

Image via Resolution Games

Demeo first appeared as a Dungeons & Dragons style tabletop RPG with strategic elements for the Quest, PSVR, and PC headsets, but it wasn’t explicitly tied to that series. That changed with the follow-up Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked. Resolution Games has the support of Wizards of the Coast now. It doesn’t change the experience much, beyond names for certain classes and places from D&D implemented, and the experience remains as solid as ever.

Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked comes with two campaigns and six heroes. The first is Embers of Chaos, which features the elves of Neverwinter and humans of Neverwinter about to go to war after the humans broke a contract and started logging in the woods, but there may be some other forces also trying to disrupt the peace. In Crown of Frost, Icewind Dale is potentially under attack, and our heroes join the forces to investigate the situation and fight back. As you go through sessions, there will be both mainline campaign quests and some supplemental missions for other NPCs. 

The characters available for each run are a Dragonborn Paladin, Dwarf Fighter, Elf Bard, Halfing Sorcerer, Human Ranger, and Tiefling Rogue, with up to four human players able to play in each session. If you have fewer than four, then there is one “main” character controlled by each human and the remaining party slots are “hirelines” that don’t level up. Those that do level up have some specialization and update options. However, all characters regardless of whether they are standard or hireling do have the options to get more cards in their 10-card deck to change their moveset.

Once you head into a quest, regardless if it is a mainline mission or optional task, you’ll get a few cards dealt into your hand. (You can only see ones held by your main character and hirelings and can’t see what other players have.) The four characters in your party will act one after another, able to move within set areas on the grid and use abilities represented on their cards to act. All classes fill their traditional roles from D&D. Once everyone in the party acts, the enemies take their turn. This continues until the stage’s objective is complete. 

It works well! There are cards that are permanent and others that are single-use, leading to a sense of balance. We also gain new ones at a steady rate, and it seemed like about once per campaign mission or so it would come up. It’s easy to investigate cards before using them, and placing them on the field to attack is simple enough. Being able to have a full party of four regardless of how many human players are there? Also great. Some genuinely tricky situations can come up too.

There are some elements in Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked that can feel a bit awkward. All of which you’ll, unfortunately, encounter at some point due to the ways campaigns work and the lengths of them. The most frequent issue I encountered is that the zoom feature effectiveness varies. Sometimes, it works wonderfully and I can get as close or as far as I need. However, there are occasional maps, usually the smaller ones, which seemed to lock me into a certain position and wouldn’t let me focus in enough to get more precise positioning. 

Some quest item appearances also seem random. For example, in one situation our party was tasked with finding pieces of sheet music for an NPC side quest. We loaded into a campaign quest map and, initially, I saw the piece of sheet music in a position there. Due to a technical issue, we ended up needing to remake the room and return. When we loaded up the save before that fight and went in, there was no sheet music there that time.

Speaking of technical issues, that’s the other awkward elements. There’s no way to assign hirelings to specific individuals. When you first make a room and head in, it will clearly assign folks to people. So if there are two folks playing, each will control one hireling. If, say, a person drops out, then needs to get the code again to pop back in, when they do rejoin the match and map, they will have no hireling assigned to them and it is impossible to go into any menu and place them in charge of that character. 

While getting the D&D license for this VR strategy game is nice, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked’s appeal lies in it being an enjoyable multiplayer tactical adventure. There are a few cumbersome elements, like the hireling assigning issue, that I’d love to see worked out in later patches. But what’s here works well and is enjoyable, especially if you have at least one other person to play with. 

Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is available for the Meta Quest headsets, PC headsets via Steam, and the PS5’s PSVR2.