Demo Man kind of blows. I'd take No Fear in that choice but it's not the best game either.
For that money you'd be much better off with Jackbot, WCS, Whirlwind, something like that.
Demo Man has lots of things that place it below its siblings from the same era...the rules are terrible, and the whole game comes off as half-baked. You get the idea that they ran out of time and/or money and at some point just pulled the rip cord on the project and shoved it out the door.
Everyone knows about the claw - makes sense only to lock balls so that whole thing (the game's main toy) is wasted, as is a bunch of the programming that you'll never see cause there's no point to picking anything besides Cryo-Lock. (I mean, everyone does it ONCE to see the "wizard mode" but after you experience that fairly unspectacular production you just go back to picking Lock every time).
This is where people chime in with "disable the claw!!!' Uh yeah, that's a good solution I guess. Or I could just get a better game.
The entire left third of the widebody playfield - and thats a lot of real estate - is wasted because of the lame software. There's no reason to shoot either of those cool shots - the eyeball or car. Why weren't one of those shots a Super Jackpot or something?
The game also has pretty bad art all-around. The sound and dots package is ok but who really has a hard-on for Demo Man? Fun enough to watch 20 minutes of when flipping past TBS but this is hardly a timeless classic.
Some shots are satisfying, the ramps are cool, multiball and combos are fun, but this one just doesn't stand up compared to the other high-quality games W/B was putting out at the time.
Yeah, even No Fear. Its simpler but the rules are better. You can time out modes but it's tempting to go for points - it's a fast game, the upper jump shot is fun, the sound and art package is pretty good. It's not the toughest game in the world but probably a good complement to Road Show which is totally different. The flow on No Fear is also better - for a game with all those ramps DM is actually pretty stop and go.