Demeo x Dungeons and Dragons: Battlemarked takes D&D‘s familiar Forgotten Realms setting and shrinks it down into a co-operative multiplayer strategy game that does everything it can to mimic the touchy-feely joy of manipulating models on the tabletop. Available now on Steam, Playstation 5, and Meta Quest, Battlemarked is designed primarily for VR, letting you and your online chums gather around a virtual table, pick up your little heroes and bash them against teeny enemies. But I don’t have a VR headset, and my play time so far suggests that I’m experiencing a far less enjoyable game because of it.
Publisher Resolution Games was kind enough to provide the whole of team Wargamer with review keys for Battlemarked – we’re always on the lookout for new potential entries to our guide to the best D&D games on PC.
Unfortunately, a round of autumn plagues swept through our office and put paid to our plans to test it in co-op multiplayer before it released on November 20. I’ve managed a small amount of time playing the game single-player, so consider what follows my first impressions. I do have one firm opinion – when you read other reviews, check whether the reviewer tested the game in VR.
Battlemarked is a turn-based strategy game that splits up the rhythm of a D&D adventure into a series of encounters in beautiful diorama-like landscapes, low on polygons but extremely high on charm. Your characters – drawn from a selection of classic DnD classes and species – and the enemies are represented by virtual miniatures, not animated digital models. It’s all about recreating the feel of playing with physical game pieces.
This isn’t a virtual tabletop for RPGs like Roll20 or the late Project Sigil, nor is it a videogame re-implementation of the DnD 5e rules like Baldur’s Gate 3. You’re getting the vibes of DnD, in a format that’s fast enough that a play session won’t be derailed by the ticking timebomb of VR headset nausea.
I don’t currently own a VR headset, but I have done in the past. It’s a unique platform that totally changes how you interact with games, and makes interactions that would be tedious or facile on a regular screen genuinely magical. While testing Battlemarked I keep finding elements that I suspect would be marvellous in VR, but which simply don’t translate onto a flat screen.
We’re talking utterly foundational stuff here, like the camera, and the way it interacts with the maps. The levels in Battlemarked are like small scale landscapes – think wargaming boards, dolls houses, model railway layouts, miniature scale villages. Gorgeous, but an absolute bear to navigate a videogame camera around. And while I wouldn’t call Battlemarked’s camera bad, I find myself continually having to wrangle with it. It feels very manual, like I’m doing a lot of work that might be handled automatically in other games.
In VR, the in-game camera is controlled by a set of motion sensors bolted to your head, which – provided they’re coded properly – make it trivial for the player to make continuous and subtle adjustments to their field of view. And as someone who has spent a lot of time building little scale environments for tiny toy soldiers, and who has repeatedly visited the diorama exhibition at Warhammer World, I suspect that simply looking at Battlemarked’s levels in VR could be masses of fun.
The control scheme also shows its VR roots. In order to move a character, you need to select and ‘pick up’ their figure, then drop them into place in their final location. Likewise, targeting an enemy with a special attack means choosing a card and dropping it onto said enemy’s head. In VR that’s literally what you would be doing, using your hands and controllers, reinforcing that sense of playing with a physical game set in a virtual world. But played via a flat screen, it’s clunkier than the well-oiled selection mechanisms in games like XCOM where you can simply cycle between targets.
Again, these observations are based on limited time with the game, and I intend to play more. I would love to discover that Battlemarked is a real beauty – but I suspect that, until fate or fortune provide me with a VR headset, that isn’t going to happen. If you’re a big fan of either version of Demeo in VR and want to tell me what I’m missing – or you’re a PC player and know a bunch of tweaks and mods I could use to get more out of it – I’d love to hear about it in the Wargamer Discord community.