The moment-to-moment gameplay in Demastered is more centered around finding the right angle to shoot the enemies. You're given a button at the start which locks you in place and lets you shoot in all eight directions, with enemy types being rather erratic in their movement. Enemy types include rats crawling on walls, spiders crawling on walls who drop on top of you if you get under them, randomly spawning bats and birds who fly from one end to the screem to another, bigger spiders, and so on. Steam users have taken to calling this a 'Controidvania', which I think is a rather fitting label. The focus lies more on the action than the exploration in this game if you ask me. Almost to the point where I'm wondering why this couldn't just be a run 'n gun since the exploration game is weak.
You start off with a peashooter with infinite ammo, but you can find a bunch of other weapons which are on the whole more effective at killing things, but run on a limited ammo supply. So you'll usually end up using your peashooter unless it's safer to quickly kill a certain enemy with a certain weapon, as ammo drops are plentiful anyways. You get a bunch of explosives which can break open barricades and kill some bigger enemies good, though bigger enemies rarely appear and your peashooter will usually do fine job of killing everything else. The other weapons you find are an assault rifle, which is decent, a shotgun, which is pretty fucking useless given its limited five-foot range, a flamethrower, which kills things VERY good, a harpoon launcher, which is incredibly useful for hit 'n run attacks and has tons of ammo to boot, a rocket launcher, which kills any regular enemy it hits in one shot, and a plasma rifle, which locks onto enemies automatically while dealing tons of damage with a relaxed ammo consumption and trivializes the entire endgame. Needless to say, the weapons you find later on are obviously much more useful.
There are ammo rooms where you find missile tanks which upgrade your maximum ammo capacity for your weapons and explosives, and can also always return to refill all your ammo. You can also change your weapons there, though there's no real need to use anything but the harpoon launcher and flamethrower, the rocket launcher for bosses, and the plasma rifle for the rest of the game when you find it. The harpoon launcher can one-shot skeletons, skulls, boomerang guys and everything beneath while having tons of spare ammo, so I always stuck to it. The flamethrower can kill a lot of things, though the game rarely got serious to the point where I really needed it, unless I had to complete some speedbooster puzzles with randomly spawning enemies in your path. Basically the weapon balance is all over the damn place. This also extends to the explosives. You have grenades, incediary grenades, and C4, but you'll always stick to the C4 because it can blow open steel and wooden barricades, whereas the others can only blow up wooden ones. And since you'll mostly be facing steel barricades later on... do the math. There's no real point to changing your weapon here unless you're preparing for a bossfight.
You play as a regular joe because you are a regular joe from a regiment of regular joes. Whenever you die, you are zombified, and you assume the role of the next regular joe from the last save point. At that point you need to kill your former zombified self with your peashooter in order to get all your upgrades and weapons back. On paper this sounds like a cool concept, but there are several other factors which make this feel like a last-minute gimmick. For starters, the only way to replenish your full health is to find an energy tank, the only other way is to grind enemies for health. If you die and kill your former self, you'll only get about half of your total health back. You won't get all your ammo back either. For that you need to run from the save room to your former self to another ammo room, and then back to the boss who just killed you. But your health will never be at 100%, that's a fact that you have to live with, contrary to all game instincts where you want to be at a full 100% before taking on a boss.
It would be even sillier if dying and then killing your old self would bring back all your health and ammo, which would make dying to get all your health back a more viable strategy than living on. Another would be to savescum, but the game autosaves when you die so that's not really an option. But I think the problem lies more with the game thoughtlessly copying the health drop system of Metroid instead of coming up with something fitting or something new. Enemies drop ammo, enemies drop small orbs which heal 5 HP, enemies drop bigger orbs which heal 20HP, you already know it all. The game does increase the drop chance of health items when you are on low health, effectively maintaining your total health around 50% if you kill everything in your path without taking too much damage.
I have no idea why health drops even have to be tied to RNG, especially with no reliable means of full health recovery aside from the rare health pack. It will only get people's instincts telling them to farm, and it comes off like Demastered is designed around one-stretch permadeath speedruns, even though there are no other modes or elements to suggest it's meant to be played like that (beyond a brief mention of GDQ in the special thanks section of the credits). You basically want to avoid players optimizing the fun out of the game, so I'm curious what the thought process was behind some of the design decisions which would result in these obvious consequences.
Thankfully I could get through Demastered without having to farm at all, because everything after the second boss is ezpz and I managed to mostly tank my way through without dying afterwards a single time. Because as everybody knows, all Metroidvanias must have a ridiculous amount of total health so there's more energy tanks to place around as secrets and to offset the fact that the combat system might suck by letting you just tank through it. The combat in Demastered doesn't suck at all, so giving you shit tons of health around the mid-game was completely unnecessary. The second boss was precisely challenging because it was actually demanding on your reflexes and you couldn't find a whole lot of energy tanks before the fight. All the bosses after that are mostly tank city. Imagine how much the game would be better off if the health system didn't simply copy Super Metroid which in turn allowed farming with low yield and gave you more health than necessary. I guess it's silly to complain about farming even when you completed the game without doing so at all, though the fact that you can farm with no better alternatives like save rooms replenishing health and nothing in the game discouraging you from doing so beyond less-yielding returns screams OVERSIGHT to me.
Bosses lie too far on the bulletsponge side of things, and have barely any phases to speak off, beyond the final and technically the second boss. Your other weapons deal more damage than your peashooter, so the obvious train of thought here is that by finding more missile tanks for your weapons and thus exploring more thoroughly, the bosses will also become easier to deal with. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that approach though, since the bosses will still remain bulletspongy even if you can kill them somewhat faster. Most bosses attack with simple spread patterns of fireballs, which is why the quick-dodge nature of the second boss is my favourite out of the game, on top of actually incorporating a movement upgrade in the fight whereas all the other bosses don't do so at all. The final boss is also kind of cool, which starts off with Princess Ahmanet going Dracula on your ass and randomly either teleporting behind you or throwing her dagger at you and randomly summoning regular monsters later on. Too bad most bosses don't really have that degree of RNG to them. It's all too static.
As you are a regular joe, and meant to feel like a grunt, you are not going to find some super special upgrades which give you a new suit or let you fly. The movement upgrades you find are rather basic and more natural. You can find a sprint which increases your jump distance the longer you run, with some secrets built around this idea, and another upgrade which lets you cling on to ceilings, though you can't glide along the ceiling as if you had a Spider Ball. The ceiling grab is surprisingly useful for letting you get a good angle on enemies in ways which aren't originally apparent, and some platforming sections do use it to a decent extent. I particularly like how natural these upgrades feel. There are no special obstacles in the game which obviously signpost that you're supposed to use this ability, it's like a natural extension of your moveset.
Beyond that there's also the usual, like increased jump height and being able to move underwater. There's also optional upgrades like no knockback on damage, increased armor, increased damage, and a phase dash which lets you dash through enemies. The dash unnecessarily clunky though, with too many wind-up and recovery frames which I feel are rather unnecessary. The fun part is that you get to dash in all eight directions as well, though this being an optional upgrade unlocked right before you unlock the final zone, there's not a whole lot of use for it. If you sprint at max speed and dash, you will perform a Shinespark which lets you dash through everything, walls, enemies, and so on. There's only like two or three opportunities where you can Shinespark for some extra bandoleers and health packs, and none of them require you to Shinespark vertically either, which feels like a missed opportunity. The map in Demastered doesn't allow for a lot of secrets through vertical exploration.
I feel like this should've been a run 'n gun instead of a Metroidvania, that way the moveset could probably be utilized to a more interesting extent. It doesn't help that like I said before that the exploration game is rather weak. You'll only make two backtracking trips throughout the entire map, it's after you find C4 and after you find underwater movement/phase dash. The Clock Tower zone looks like it was ripped straight out of CV3 with its turning gears and is the closest in the game to being an actual stage as its platforming challenges are tight and there's nothing in it to backtrack for. It is also the most challenging and most fun zone because of all the platforming challenge. You can find some collectibles in the form of Relics of which there are 50 spread throughout the map, but from what I've gathered, gathering all 50 doesn't really do anything other than giving you an achievement. Which is lousy.
Another thing which strongly bothers me is how bland the game feels. While the sprite art is excellent and the music is catchy, everything else in the game has next to no identity. The story is absolutely cookie cutter stuff which plays the 'go defeat the evil undead wizard and prevent him from summoning the evil undead god' plot completely straight with no interesting twists or turns. The dialogue delivered to you by Princess Ahmanet before fighting a boss is barebones generic villain stuff (which you can't even skip), and the intro or ending aren't particularly satisfying either. It's just a straightforward acknowledgement that you must go save the world and that you have saved the world. Most bosses are featureless big monsters, save for the Clock Tower boss which has a cool background at the very least. The detailed backgrounds do lend some atmosphere to the game, but don't carry it by a long shot. All this coupled with no real innovation (save for the ZombiU death mechanic which only comes off as a gimmick) makes for a rather forgettable game. I'm sure I've seen that desert London in Portrait of Ruin though...
There's not a lot of replay value to speak of here, with no alternative modes, difficulty settings or a map filled with tons of secrets. On my first run of six hours I managed to get 99% map completion, on top of obtaining all health tanks, missile tanks, and upgrades. Only one square of the map I've missed and some relics which I didn't very much care to look for. I don't even play Metroidvanias that much, yet I've managed to found most of what the game had to offer. That's kinda barebones, but so tend to be most of WayForward's licensed games. Get The Mummy: Demastered if you want an alright Metroidvania for an alright evening.
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I'd give DS 1 a try but I'd probably just get disappointed.
