Review : Sword of the Necromancer Resurrection : FORWARD!

I never played the original Sword of the Necromancer. I hadn’t even heard of it until this remake was announced. It’s not a game I would normally have looked at–I mean, it doesn’t even have cooking! Even Kingdom Hearts 3 has a cooking mini-game (even though it’s locked behind the longest loading screens I’ve ever seen… but I digress). But I took a look at the game, watched the trailer, and thought “That looks fun.” And I was right…mostly.

A Quick Couple of Notes Before We Begin

First of all, I don’t know if they’ve patched this out, but when I was playing it there was a bug that made the entire game scale to four times the size if you alt-tabbed out of the game, meaning you could only see the top-left corner. I fixed this by turning off fullscreen (which triggered the same bug), clicking and alt-tabbing around until the bug went away, and then setting the resolution to match my monitor. I didn’t have problems after that, but there was about an hour where if we were still in the era of CD-ROM games, I would probably have flung it at the wall. So if you alt-tab and see the bug happen, I would recommend you do the same. I would also recommend you test alt-tab before you start playing because if you run into that bug, it will become very hard to save your game.

Second, if you launch the game now, it will tell you it’s best played with a controller. That… wasn’t there before. I did not play it with a controller. I played with a keyboard and mouse because it’s a PC game, and that’s how I play PC games. It worked fine for me doing it that way, aside from some counterintuitive menu weirdness that I had to figure out by trial and error. But bear in mind that my experience with said interface is going to be different because, well, no one told me not to do it that way.

On to the review.

Dance, Puppets, Dance!

The most important part of this game and one that it absolutely nailed: this game is fun.

The first time I launched the game, I only played about an hour. That was normal for me–1-2 hours was about what I had to play most days. And during those 1-2 hour bursts, the game was just fun.

The game mentions roguelike elements, but I didn’t see any, unless they’re counting the randomly generated traits that monsters get. This is a good thing for my ability to play the game because I am… okay at games. I’m not bad. But I’m not great. I never got to where I could qualify to start Shadow of the Erdtree, if you get what I mean.

But for my skills, the game was a lot of fun. There are platforming elements that aren’t too much for someone who doesn’t play platformers, just enough to make me feel successful when I made it to the end of a particularly long chain of jumps and dashes. There is enough strategy and tools for combat that you can get fancy, or you can just slash things up (mostly–some enemies have directional damage immunity, and you’ll need to use a dodge to get behind them). Summoning monsters, having them fight with me, whittling down enemies from afar with a bow before diving in for the final hits–it has a satisfying rhythm to it.

This isn’t a groundbreaking game, even outside of being a remake. This is a game that mapped out what it wanted to be with bold bright lines and filled in that map with care and glee. And the result is a mostly delightful little hack-and-slash. It’s hard for me to put into words why it’s fun; it just is. And that’s important because that kept me going and enjoying the game when I started running into issues.

The game also killed it with the audio–specifically, the soundtrack and the voice acting. The soundtrack is an absolute bop that I would get stuck in my head after I turned the game off, and the voice acting is good enough that I actually listened to entire cutscenes (I have a habit of reading ahead and skipping past the vocals, even when my boyfriend is insisting that I need to listen to them, so this is pretty impressive).

But Professor Oak, Can’t I Keep One More?

Considering the game is all about the summons, and one of the main ways you get materials to upgrade weapons is from picking up and discarding summons… we need to talk about the summons.

You’re capped at twenty summoned monsters throughout the game. I never found a way to increase that. And that’s just… not enough. You’ll come across more than that in each level of the dungeon, and that’s not counting the ones that you hold onto because they’re your best guys at the moment. Twenty slots disappear fast; most of the time I was walking around with more than half of them already filled just from monsters I needed. And at certain points in the game, the level of monster you’re encountering just plummets. Going from the end of floor 2 to the beginning of floor 3, the monsters go from level 18 or so to level 11 or so. I still picked those monsters up, knowing I was just going to trash them in a few minutes because, again, that’s how you get mats.

The small monster inventory is compounded by an inability to auto-discard monsters under a certain level, or to sort your monster inventory by level or type or anything other than order of acquisition. It got tedious having to stop every few minutes to go through and get rid of every monster below the current level of my main team, or everyone who had a detrimental trait, or every monster of a given type that wasn’t as good as the monster of that type in my main team, or everyone who only had one trait (I got really tight on space eventually).

So I guess the moral here is that even when it’s not a cozy game, I will still bitch about inventory.

Moving on.

“No! It Still Only Took One Punch!”

I mentioned earlier that I am okay at games, right? Right. I want you to bear that in mind when I say that the game is too easy. By like, a lot.

Actually, for the entire middle of the game, my only major complaint was that it was too easy. It’s especially noticeable when you change zones and the enemy levels drop, but it never really goes away. This game’s combat can be played with depth, but I never needed to. I pretty much just ran face-first at enemy mobs, summons trailing behind me, and came out on top. I had to heal at points, but that’s done from a menu, so it’s not like I was in danger doing it. Plus the game drops so many healing items on you that I think I capped out at some points. I would frequently not notice that my monsters had been KOed because I was just running around killing things, and then I would eventually look down and realize I was missing a health bar or two or three. And then I’d go assign other monsters to the three summon slots and summon those monsters because, like I said above, you get too many monsters anyway. This is just natural selection.

The low difficulty really became a problem when I tried out the challenge modes. When I saw them, I figured they were meant for late game. But when I did them in late game, well… To be fair, I did fail both of them. But that’s because I got bored and careless and stopped paying attention to my health bar.

The challenge modes don’t reduce the level of your summons, or make you get new ones, or anything like that. So you go into this mini-dungeon that reduces you to level 1, but you still have your level, I don’t know, 23-24 monsters? And unless their A.I. glitches and they just get stuck behind a wall or something odd, they just breathe on the enemies and kill them. Of course, you could play without summons, or only using summons you get during the mini-dungeon, or any number of other restrictions. But you can also play Pokemon with Nuzlocke rules. It doesn’t mean Pokemon is hard, it just means you’re making the game harder for yourself.

The boss rush isn’t much better. I took the instructions seriously. I leveled up and geared up and…facerolled. Until the Necromancer showed up as a boss and again, I got bored and careless and got myself killed. So why did I get bored and careless and killed? Well, because I was really only doing this to try to find the end of the game.

Mild spoilers ahead

I’d Do Anything for Love, But I Won’t Do That

This game was going to be a 7, maybe a 7.5, until something happened. Something that should have been a triumph, that should have triggered the end of the game: I cleared the whole map. I beat the Necromancer. I went into the last soul chamber and released the soul there.

And nothing happened.

I was baffled. I tried to interact with Koko’s body in the entrance chamber. I tried going back to the last soul room. Had something gone wrong? Was I missing something? I checked the tutorials. The only slightly relevant one was the one for the Sword of the Necromancer, which only talked about how to revive monsters. I checked the cut-scene archive. The only relevant cutscene was the one where the necromancer first shows up, and all it says is to meet it in the far chamber and beat it up. Which I had done.

Then I resorted to what I hate using in a game I’m playing for a review: I Googled it.

Unsurprisingly, 48 hours after the game’s release when I was looking for this, there was no way to get this information for this game. I did, however, find a brief statement from a run of the old version, the 2D one: “You have to do the entire run in one go in order to get the full power of the sword of the necromancer.” This was from an hour-long video (thanks MRS Plays), and it was the old game, so I didn’t search through to see if there was any clarification on what counted as a “run” in that version of the game. And it may not even apply in the new game. But that’s part of the problem. There is no clue in the game about how to revive Koko beyond “get to the end of the dungeon and beat the Necromancer.” Which I did. And again, nothing happened.

I thought about re-trying. I thought about doing the whole “wing” up to the necromancer in one go and seeing if that changed it. Then I thought about what I would do if that didn’t work. I thought about what I would do if I had to do the whole game in one run, or meet all the challenge elements of the Necromancer fight (which include “don’t get hit”), or some other obscure combination I hadn’t even thought of.

And I turned the game off.

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This game lived and died for me by its fun element. It is a fun game. But it’s fun in the way that it’s a good game to pick up when you have a spare hour or two. It’s not fun in the way that I want to grind it for several hours on end, especially not even knowing if it would make a difference. I’m sure there’s more game locked behind resurrecting Koko. I even glimpsed references to what all might be hiding there while I was trying to find out how to resurrect Koko. But even that wasn’t enough to make me want to tackle the fishing expedition of finding out how that works. I enjoyed more of my time with this game than I didn’t. But that just wasn’t enough to get me any further.

Thank you to the team at Grimorio Games for providing a review code for Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection. To note, we have reached out to the developer with regard to the ending not triggering. We will update this review accordingly should we receive more detail.

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