Sword of the Necromancer

Sword of the Necromancer manages to bring something new to the flooded rogue-like genre while providing a heartwarming story. It has a multitude of options to allow players to tailor the game to their liking. It’s breadth of mechanics allow for tons of experimentation that will keep you coming back until you finally get the true ending.

Sword of the Necromancer is a gem of a game. While visually it can look a little repetitive, the game is honestly a ton of fun. I think this one may be a game people remember for a long time.

Sword of the Necromancer is a game that will scratch a very particular itch for fans of rogue-lite experiences that feature more narrative than the genre is known for. The gameplay mechanics deliver one cool idea, the monster resurrection, but fail to make full use of it, especially when players need to deal with bosses or the more capable enemies of later levels. I wanted the game to give me more reasons to use the monsters I revived, to understand them, to build strategies around the ones I chose to carry around. The development team clearly understands how important is to ground players into a narrative. But they need to make sure that there’s deeper integration between the world and the gameplay to create a successful rogue-lite. Right now Sword of the Necromancer is like one of its monsters, intriguing at first but quickly dropped when it no longer seems useful.

Sword of the Necromancer is by no means a perfect game, but it's still enjoyable with a few issues here and there. Tama never feels like she's getting stronger and the monsters you summon are hit and miss as to whether they'll actually be effective in a fight or just randomly run around the room going nowhere near where you want them to. The bosses are also hit and miss when it comes to those that require strategy and those that just have you run away for a bit before getting in one or two hits and repeating. However, the story is great and well voice-acted and the soundtrack has a lot of nice tracks to listen to.

Sword of the Necromancer is an enjoyable game with a story that really makes you want to play more, though after playing through the same sections multiple times with a lot of the same enemies can get repetitive after a while, especially once you get to the end and realise you need to start over for the full ending.

Sword of the Necromancer is a fun roguelike, with a unique enemy revival system that sets it apart from other titles in the genre. Unfortunately, a lacklustre combat system and unoriginal story mean that it doesn't quite match up to the absolute best roguelikes out there.

The Sword of the Necromancer tells its love story in an interesting way and may surprise you with a plot twist, but its not enough to outweigh the game’s repetitiveness or the fact that you can’t control your undead and need to rely on their random, silly AI. [04/2021, p.63]

If you are looking for a 2D dungeon crawler with some rogue-lite options, Sword of the Necromancer might just scratch that itch, but for me the legend didn’t quite live up to what I had hoped.

The emotional story is this game’s biggest asset, but gets lost in long text passages and is included in quite weak mechanics.

I will almost certainly play a sequel if there is one but Sword of the Necromancer is a hard sell. It might be worth resurrecting, but not more than once.