With games getting ever more expensive and often in new and “exciting” ways, having the chance to try before you buy is extremely valuable. I needn’t list off the merits to you, as there’s really only one that matters: getting to see if the game is actually for you or not. Some games sound great on paper and even look great in gameplay videos only to turn to not be all that fun in practice. Conversely, there are games that live up to your expectations and getting to play them early just makes you all that more eager to buy. It’s a great system when it’s available, and it’s thankfully becoming more common once again.

One demo that saved me some money recently is the one for Valkyrie: Elysium. I’d been interested in it for a while and was planning on picking it up since it was on sale, but my friend told me to try the demo first. After doing so, I was left feeling that the game wasn’t really for me after all. The game’s visuals are great, especially it’s painting-like art style and character designs. The music was also decent, as where the handful of environments I saw. There were just two problems.

The first was that I was not, it turned out, actually interested in yet another Norse mythology story. With so many games and movies borrowing from it lately (God of War Ragnarok in particular comes to mind), I’m just kind of over it. I thought I could get invested, but it seems that I can’t; not right now, anway. The second issue is the combat; I found it to be a weird combination of overly simple and poorly explained. I could fight and defeat enemies just fine, but I didn’t really understand how I was doing it or what the system actually wanted me to do. There’s not a lot of satisfaction for me in combat systems I don’t understan, so I kinda tuned out pretty quick.

On the flipside, the demo for Stellar Blade absolutely sold me on the game. I’ve been waiting for someone to capture a bit of the Neir: Automata magic for several years now, and Stellar Blade does a decent job as far as exploring the environment and its action-focused combat goes. And, yes, it also helps that many of the characters are extremely attractive. Seriously though, the game looks and sounds fantastic, finding things in the world is fun and actually adds a little bit of challenge, and I found the combat to be nice and punchy. It’s a bit more focused on combos and parries than Nier was, but that’s fine. I’m definitely looking forward to picking it up someday.

A game I wish I could haveplayed a demo for is Underworld: Ascendant on PlayStation. I’d seen videos from other games in the series that lookedd fun, and I thought this would be the same, but first impressions aren’t great so far. First off, it runs at 30fps or less, which really stinks in a game that incorporates a lot of physics and manipulating objects; everything just feels slower than it should be. It’s also extremely dark. I mean, it was hard to see even with my brightness settings turned all the way up!

Aside from that, combat is feeling rather clunky and awkward at the outset, so I’m really hoping it’s not really the main focus. I’m still going to try to push forward and see if it gets better, but we’ll see. I managed to pick it up for only about $8 so it’s not a huge loss if it turns out to not be all that fun, but I’m thinking I probably wouldn’t have grabbed it at all if I’d tried a demo first. So yeah, here’s hoping we see more of those, eh?

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What’s a good demo you’ve played recently? How about a bad one? What’s a game you wish had had a demo before you bought it?

Image is promo art posted to the official Stellar Blade X account