We were already allowed with Sword of the Necromancer got started before the game’s demo became available today. In this roguelike you play as a necromancer who has to slaughter all kinds of creatures with the unique game concept that you can bring the killed creatures back to life to fight for you. In this preview you can read whether that worked just as well as it sounds.
The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s graphics style, which is that it has a cute pixel style. It seems somewhat forced, because the text is sometimes a bit difficult to read and some objects look unclear compared to the background. In addition, the game alternates between a pixel style for the game and drawn cutscenes, which look nice.
Combat is the most important thing in a roguelike dungeon crawler and you often encounter them here. You move from room to room and each room contains a number of enemies. With your special sword you can bring these monsters back to life for use in battle. We ourselves expected that the monsters would follow you so that you get a large army, but unfortunately that is not the case. You obtain the monsters as deployable items that you must activate, allowing you to keep up to three monsters.
Unfortunately, these monsters are pretty stupid, as most of the creatures we conjured up again often seemed to wander towards the enemy and only occasionally attack. By the time they tried this, they had often been exterminated by the enemies, after which you will get an unnecessarily exaggerated message on your screen, pausing everything. A strange choice in our opinion, because this takes the speed out of the game enormously.
The fighting itself is also a bit slow. Each attack takes a certain amount of time to execute, so battles don’t feel like a flashy ballet, but rather like a strategic game where you have to calmly think about what your next attack would be. Not very disturbing, but the fact that swinging a small dagger around also takes a long time makes attacks somewhat painfully slow. In the tutorial you will learn about your options, but it does not mention that you can also charge attacks, something that can certainly help you in your journey.
–
On the other hand, enemies seem to be able to attack spontaneously. When a knight lashes out with his sword after some time, we attacked, but it seemed to be able to attack again spontaneously because it had changed direction. If the knight did not move, it could only attack once every few seconds. These kinds of strange scenes are unfortunately very common, so you can never really learn the game properly because every rule does not have to be absolutely true.
Often dying in a roguelike is part of the experience, but unfortunately we didn’t notice anything Sword of the Necromancer. At the time of writing, there wasn’t even an animation for dying, other than falling over and being back at the entrance. Perhaps more explanations or information will be added in the future, but we were occasionally surprised at what exactly happened.
The graphics style is not the most appropriate for the game in our opinion and the attacks are excruciatingly slow for such games. The game also lacks the necessary finishing touches, which makes it all feel like a project from the 90s. Perhaps this will be polished up in the next month before release and the adventure starts to get more interesting, because adding the concept of dead creatures to your arsenal is nicely done. Although the way in which has not been worked out very conveniently. Want Sword of the Necromancer really interesting, there will be a lot of things to be polished or changed, although the basic concept is cool.
For this preview Sword of the Necromancer was played on PC. The full version will be released December 10 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC, with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S at a later date.
–
