Demeo Battles Is an Excellent, Fast-Paced VR Game [Review]

We’ve been playing Demeo Battle, and if you’re into virtual reality in any way, you’ve almost definitely heard of, if not played, Demeo. Not only is it one of the best mixed-reality games for the Meta Quest 3, it’s also just one of the best VR games overall.

Plus, the tactical roguelike tabletop-esque experience has a standard version too, which means people who don’t own a VR headset can still get stuck into this excellent game. While the normal game is fully cooperative in nature, Demeo Battles takes all of the systems that make the game so incredibly moreish and allows you to turn against each other instead of helping each other out. It’s a cool idea, and one that’s innately interesting to any fans of Demeo.

Demeo Battles allows you to duke it out in battles that are either 1v1 or 2v2. At the beginning of each battle, you’ve got some money to spend, and the strategic choices kick off right there and then. You can choose to spend your money on cards, with some being powerful items and abilities for your chosen hero, and others being monsters that will be on the field to fight alongside you.

You don’t have direct control over the monsters, but the AI is generally pretty good at getting them where they need to go, and hitting the things that need hitting. There may well end up being mathematically correct choices here, but given that you’ve got to consider not only your own heroes, but also the opposing ones, we doubt that anyone will bother figuring that out.

Once the battle starts, you place down your units, and the fight kicks off. As with Demeo, you’ll be taking turns to figure out what happens, with you choosing how you move and attack, and which cards you use to do so. Each hero has a basic ability card or two they can use, but the special ones you buy or find on the battlefield will often have far more impact.

There are chests on the field that grant more cards, and things change as you go on through the battle and defeat enemies too. Probably the biggest change here is that as the battle rages on the field becomes covered in flames. Each turn brings a new line of flames around the outside of the arena that closes in. This not only forces battles to actually involve fights, but also limits how long they can be.

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That’s the short of how each match will play out, but every experience you have is going to be dictated by the people you’re playing with. In our experience, Demeo Battles is at its best when either paired up with or against people you know. That’s pretty much true of nearly every multiplayer game, so it’s not a big surprise, but it is worth noting.

Even when you’re just playing against the computer though, you’re still going to have a lot of fun with Demeo Battles. One of the few issues with Demeo is that the campaigns tend to be rather long, with most sessions lasting a fair bit longer than the Meta Quest 3 battery. Demeo Battles lets you live out bite-size 20-minute battles that satisfy all of those tactical urges without taking up all of your time. It’s very enjoyable.

Taking all of those decisions and the fun gameplay loop and putting it into a more digestible experience is a good shout. If you’ve got a VR headset, or even if you don’t, as this game’s also coming to Steam standard, then Demeo Battles could be a great way to spend your time. The fact that it’s cross-platform actually alleviates one of the biggest issues of multiplayer VR games too, which is that the playerbase can sometimes dwindle far too quickly.

If you’ve been hoping for a more fast-paced tactical PvP game, and you happen to like the tabletop feel that’s going on here, then Demeo Battles could be an excellent addition to your roster of multiplayer games. It looks good, the sound design is fun, and if you’re in VR, it remains one of the coolest experiences going.