When Din's Curse, the Diablo-like hack-and-slash RPG came out early last year, I was quite impressed with what it achieved. It gave gamers a somewhat typical dungeon-dwelling experience, spruced up with a town that was under seige, randomly generated quests, monster factions that interacted with each other, and a huge variety of customizations for your character and the world.

In addition to the standard stuff like Hardcore mode (you die, your character is gone forever), you could also pick options such as a Cursed character that could only equip cursed items, something that results in....interesting encounters to say the least. You're also able to set the level of monsters relative to your own, making things tough if you feel encounters have been too easy lately.

And the towns, the places you're tasked to protect due to servitude to the god Din, have a life of their own. In the first game, it wasn't too pronounced: sometimes monsters attacked, forcing you to hurry back from the dungeon to defend the townspeople (who could very well die), random quests abound and rewards were there as well. Towns were often lost, especially on the higher difficulties, but that didn't really affect you, as you were instantly whisked away to yet another settlement built upon some sort of horrific dungeon piled high with nasties.

The expansion, Demon War, builds upon the various mechanics of the first game, adding new interactions, quests, monsters, a new character class and modifiers, and in general just improves upon the original in a variety of ways.

The first, most obvious addition is that of the Demon Hunter class. It's something of a magic/physical blend, one that has special attacks against demon-type monsters, and a decent class to play as. Still, I found it better to just use one of its skill trees as part of a hybrid class; things better that way.

Other additions are those that can't quite be quantified, and may not even be noticed if you haven't played the original game before. The biggest addition I saw was a massive growth in NPC interactions, both with you and now with each other. Townspeople now each have their own sorts of personalities, though they're not particularly deep. They'll fight with each other, try to survive by eating food (and starving otherwise), creating more issues for you to solve and take care of. For the most part, it adds a lot more flavour to the towns you protect, but sometimes it just feels like you're simply throwing a bunch of money at people because they can't seem to feed themselves.

Oh, there are also additions to game modes as well, things like having your town get constantly attacked, being a prima donna who only equips very rare weaponry, having your life tied to the life of the town, and more. There is simply hundreds of ways to play the game, and it's sure to keep any hack-and-slasher enthusiast busy as they try to save town after town.

Demon War isn't the greatest expansion I've seen to a game like this, but it's certainly something. It capitalizes on the strengths of Din's Curse and its unique properties, building upon them and adding more properties of that kind to the game, instead of just adding more enemies or something (though there are more of those). Like the original game, if you want something different in your dungeon delving, something else that just isn't on the market, Din's Curse, and now its expansion, will be perfect for you.