The third and final offering in Renegade Kid's "DS FPS" trilogy, (at least until the remastered versions on other systems started to come out).
To start with, it feels way easier than Dementium 1 as far as general gameplay. You'll quickly notice that in contrast to Dementium 1's self-contained episodic progression, the game world is generally a lot more open— though progressing through the game is still very linear, there are a few missable extra goodies you can optionally go back for once you have the means to open barriers that were previously insurmountable (though this really only comes into play after you first grab the sledgehammer early on, and in the endgame, as your one and only chance to get the nail gun weapon is to return to an out of the way location between when you start the final chapter and when you cross over into the final area, which is a point of no return— I missed this in my first and so far only run. As an aside, let it also be said that I don't think any of these aspects qualify the game as either a metroidvania or an im-sim, both of which have notoriously waffly definitions, and the latter of which I've looked into extensively in the recent past).
Notably, this world structure means that instead of only being able to truly save between chapters as in the first game, you'll come across various save points which give you a complete health refill each time you use them. Between this and being able to carry the health pill items around in your inventory (which was not an option in the first game) to use on demand whenever you please, as well as the more powerful health kit items, death, and indeed any real sense of danger, becomes a lot more infrequent. This is somewhat mitigated by limited inventory space, which must be shared with ammo for your various guns (as well as the adrenaline syringe items, which I never used, but it doesn't seem like there's enough of them in the game to fill even a single stack), which is nowhere near as plentiful as in Moon, but it is entirely possible to take down any non-boss enemy with melee weapons by simply bailing back to a save point to heal when necessary.
Speaking of bosses, the game also feels way easier than Moon as far as those, of which there are not very many, with the final boss being about the only exception— it was the only one that took me more than one try, but just as Moon's final boss, it becomes easy once you figure out how to deal with its patterns. Much like Moon, this game also has a bonus postgame mode, which in this case is an endless survival gauntlet that doesn't feel particularly worthwhile.
Other aspects are mostly forgettable. The graphics are quite fine for the system. The story is nothing special, similar to Silent Hill but with less thought put into it, which is fairly appropriate considering the series' roots, and the wordless ending presents an apparent twist which is then immediately subverted and made more confusing instead, and well at this point it really looks like we'll never get more. The music is still largely just ambient, even in the snowy outdoor areas (which were a bit of a surprise to me in and of themselves, considering the contrast with the first game's consistently dark settings) where it sounds like it would start to do a bit more, but the series' fairly catchy leitmotif makes a return with a few new variations.
It's worth checking out as a curiosity, I'd say. Honestly, between how unique this game actually is as a DS title, my memories of the brief but memorable ARG ad campaign, and finally being able to play through it on real hardware, I think I have some unironic nostalgia for it now.
