I guess I should start by saying I never played the original Sword of the Necromancer. It just kinda looks like super incredibly ultra generic indie pixel art, to be honest, and it never caught my attention. This 3D remake did catch my eye, though, because it looks like a freaking super polished modern ZELDA OCARINA OF TIME. Look at it! It's gorgeous! Oh my god, I'm totally in love with the presentation here.
I will also fully admit that the promise of a yuri love story was also appealing. It's a tale of the tragic forbidden love of a bandit thief and the priestess who hired her as a bodyguard. At the beginning of the game, the priestess is dead, so the bandit has sought out the legend of the sword of the necromancer to bring her back to life. As you play through the necromancer's dungeon, you see cutscenes of their budding relationship during their travels together. And ... it's all totally and utterly generic. We've seen similar stories a million times already in games and anime. Just because it's two women doesn't magically make it good (don't tell ResetERA I said that, though).
The gameplay is also kinda stinky as well. It's a pretty basic 3D action game with light puzzle solving and platforming, but you can also resurrect the monsters you beat and they fight alongside you. The monster stuff is sort of interesting in that you have to use them to solve certain puzzles, but the puzzles are extremely basic and obvious. The A.I. for the monsters is pretty terrible as well as they'll refuse to follow you, get stuck in doorways, clip through walls, and just stand around while enemies murder them.
You can edit the monster behaviour to do all sorts of things, but 1. it's a huge pain in the ass, and 2, mostly ineffective anyway. Your tamed monsters are mostly just useful as fodder to distract the enemies. The monsters level up and get stronger the more you use them, but it's a messy unnecessary over complicated system overall that doesn't really add much. I will say that I had some leveled up monsters actually one-shot bosses, so they definitely aren't useless, as long as their AI actually works, at least, but they also just aren't all that fun.
Your character's gameplay isn't much to write home about, either. You have two melee weapons and then another slot for either projectiles, magic, or a shield. The combat is mostly just mash mash mashy buttons to stun lock enemies until they're dead and not especially fun. It's also pretty janky. The lock on is weird and finnicky and you'll constantly whiff attacks for no reason. The combat just doesn't ever feel particularly good or satisfying.
The game is glitchy, too. I had to reboot the game multiple times because switches or pressure plates just wouldn't work and then I'd reset and do the exact same thing and magically the door would open. It also crashes disappointingly frequently. In the final part of the dungeon it crashed over and over and over for me. Eventually, I had a lucky run and got through it, but I was definitely ready to just quit entirely instead.
I'll also add that there is an entirely predictable "shocking twist" halfway through the game that changes up the gameplay a bit, but doesn't make it better. It kinda gets quite a bit worse, actually.
When I first started playing I was really into it, which makes how I ultimately ended up feeling all the more disappointing. The gameplay is too simple, the glitches and crashes started rapidly adding up, and I lost interest in the story pretty early on, so the more I played, the less I liked it. It does have reasonably easy achievements, though, and the $25 price tag is actually pretty fair, I'd say.
In the end, I'd say I'm pretty disappointed with Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection. Don't let the gorgeous presentation fool you, the game underneath is too simple, too janky, too glitchy, and never feels especially good or fun to play. It's in no way a bad game, it's just very mediocre. It's a 5/10, and then gets bumped to a 6 because of how it looks, but we don't really do scores here so forget that. I won't tell you to skip it, but I can't give it a recommendation, either.
Comments
Post a Comment