After playing Demigod for the past few days, it's clear that you almost have to play another game before giving any thoughts. That game is, of course, Defense of the Ancients, a custom scenario for WarCraft 3. You can't talk about Demigod without talking about DotA, at least as far as I can tell from reading the threads on various gaming fora. There is an entire section of the review guide for Demigod that deals with the differences between itself and Defense of the Ancients.

I haven't played Defense of the Ancients. You can filter all my thoughts through that sentence, or howl with rage if that makes you feel better.

In Demigod, you play as one of eight... well, demigods, on maps where you face off against the opposing side. Each player has a demigod he or she controls, and there are computer-controlled armies that clash against each other as you battle. You can set differing conditions for success, including killing the other side's demigods, destroying its Citadel, or controlling enough flags to score a set number of "war points."

In fact, the options for the game are rather extensive, even though they may not seem so at first blush. You basically play a hero unit, and you have many decisions to make. Should you attack the other team's Citadel? Keep their demigods busy? Fight the underlings for easy victories to level up and gain more abilities? You can't be everywhere, and deciding where to use your power and to what extent is a large part of the strategy of the game. The other side's demigods are just as active as you are, and it's always amusing when players ignore each other in order to take care of more pressing business on the map.

As you fight, you gain powers, which use mana and are as varied as the demigods, and as you gain possession of different flags on the map you also gain the ability to earn more gold or visit stores where you can buy items. Or you can spend your gold making your buildings or soldiers more powerful. The strategy is abyssal, even if the maps are relatively small. It's like a chess board: limited space to move, but a ton of strategy to use within those barriers.

The game doesn't offer much in the way of a manual, there are no tutorials, and the single-player mode consists of games against the AI. It's not a very welcoming game, although in an hour or so you'll feel right at home and will have begun to work out some strategy. I recommend playing with a friend against the computer for a while, so you can be confused together.

Even at the lower levels of strategy though, you can have fun going toe-to-toe with other demigods, taking flags, leveling up, and exploring the powers of each demigod. There are only eight maps, but by changing the conditions of each one and playing with different combinations of Demigods and human and AI opponents, you can stretch out the replay value quite well. Even playing against another player with the same demigod, you can both try very, very different strategies.

I don't feel like I'm in much of a position to review the game, but I'm having a great time learning about the system and feeling my way around the game to find out what works well. Expectations about game length is a funny thing: I've put the length of a normal single-player game into Demigod so far, and I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what there is to learn about the title.

Unfortunately I've also run into a few connection problems while playing online with friends, and going online shows that I'm far from the only one. That's disappointing, and as we were trying to get the issues worked out, I was chatting with my friends on our Vent server. It became clear how this is affecting the game's chances at retail. "I'm going to wait until all this is worked out," one of my online gaming buddies said when I asked if he was buying the game. He said he didn't want to beta test it for the first week, and when I tried to argue about how good the game is, he brought up the fact that he had listened to us curse the online system for fifteen minutes. That was hard to argue against.

You know it's bad news when the CEO of the publisher suggests you use a third-party solution to play online. "Now right now, Demigod, as a game, is awesome. Demigod, as an on-line service, however, sucks ass. It works fine for what I dare say most people but for others, it's just awful," Brad Wardell wrote on his blog yesterday.

I can say I'm enjoying the game mightily so far, and discovering new strategies every day as I play more and more skirmishes online and off. For $40, this is an easy game to recommend for those who like their strategy fast-paced. While I'm sure I could give a much more thorough review if I had a day or two to do nothing but play Demigod, I can say that after the first ten hours or so, I'm going to give it a thumbs up, would play again.

A stronger single-player game, built-in voice chat, and working multiplayer would have made this one much easier to recommend, but I have a feeling the game we'll be playing in a week will feel nothing like the online experience players are having now. We'll keep checking in.