Necropolis is a stylish game. It's bold cell-shaded art style is gorgeous, and fits well with the short, snappy dialogue and simple loot system. It's a game that goes for bare minimum in all aspects, and while it does lend itself some class, I wish it had maybe splashed out on stuff to actually DO.
It took me a while to get to grips with the basics of Necropolis' combat, which is a bit more involved than what I'm used to in Roguelikes. It's familiar enough that my Dark Souls instincts kicked into full gear, but different enough that said instincts caused me nothing but grief. It's not as meaty as DS, feeling instead like if you cranked the Zelda slider on DS up a tad. Enemies flash red when hit and you don't get to see health bars, and only the heaviest of weapons will stagger them. The animations sometimes feel a little clunky, but I found that less of a problem as I played.
The biggest difference comes in managing max stamina, representing exhaustion. You'll lose max stamina over time very slowly, slightly sped up by things like jumping, running and light attacks, and really brought down by using heavy attacks. You restore your max stamina with the same healing items that restore health, leading to some interesting resource balancing. Being low on stamina is obviously a problem, but do you really want to eat a healing item NOW, when you have full health? What about the reverse, would it be worth going for a power attack at low health just to make that ration more worthwhile? It's neat, I dig it.
Your narrative frame here is that you're an adventurer from some faraway land, invading the Necropolis for unknown(possibly forgotten) reasons, venturing into it's depths at the behest of the Brazen Head, a cool-ass pyramid with an eye whose hobbies include demeaning you, berating you, chastising you and making wisecracks about stuff which supposedly happened in places.
And it's a good thing those wisecracks are funny, because there's a lot of them. Between the Brazen Head's quips, item descriptions and messages on the wall, Necropolis is all about these snippets of worldbuilding, popularised by the Souls series, evoking the same sense of puzzling together parts of a story while also royally taking the piss out of the format with silly jokes, and a setting not nearly as bleak and depressing as, say, Lordran.
Compared to others of the genre, Necropolis' Roguelike elements are quite thin. Your runs will be mostly defined by the equipment you pick up, which comes in 4 tiers and covers an armour set, 2 weapons and 2 pieces of off-hand equipment (usually a shield). Enemies drop the weapons they use when made dead, which offers a nice catch-up mechanic if you've been unlucky with drops, and severely lessens the feeling of being fucked over by RNG that you can sometimes get from Roguelikes. But the lack of variety in how your character can turn out does make for a game without nearly as much longevity as many other games in it's genre.
And compounding that is the fact that there's no real need to play again when you finish it. Binding of Issac, considered by many to be one of the best examples of the genre, offers multiple endings, lots of characters to get them with and enough items to make for an insane number of unique experiences. Necropolis doesn't even come close to that much content.
What Necropolis has is great. But there's not a whole lot of it. It's had one major update in it's lifetime which added the Brute as a second character option, which does add a lot if you're the type to want to finish the game with both characters(the Brute also has different movesets for every weapon, so they really feel different to play as), but it's still an incredibly small game on the content side. With a simple dose of more stuff it could probably stand as one of the best in the genre, but as it is it lacks the legs for that.
I'd still recommend it, but if you're going in, know you aren't going to be spending as much time in the Necropolis as you would, well, any other Roguelike.
So yeah, Necropolis. Super good, but super small. A lovely vacation of a game.
Next up, well, I've a lot of my plate and it's holiday season. I'm juggling Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness and Final Fantasy XV, plus a myriad of other, significantly smaller ventures accumulated in the steam sale.
It took me a while to get to grips with the basics of Necropolis' combat, which is a bit more involved than what I'm used to in Roguelikes. It's familiar enough that my Dark Souls instincts kicked into full gear, but different enough that said instincts caused me nothing but grief. It's not as meaty as DS, feeling instead like if you cranked the Zelda slider on DS up a tad. Enemies flash red when hit and you don't get to see health bars, and only the heaviest of weapons will stagger them. The animations sometimes feel a little clunky, but I found that less of a problem as I played.
The biggest difference comes in managing max stamina, representing exhaustion. You'll lose max stamina over time very slowly, slightly sped up by things like jumping, running and light attacks, and really brought down by using heavy attacks. You restore your max stamina with the same healing items that restore health, leading to some interesting resource balancing. Being low on stamina is obviously a problem, but do you really want to eat a healing item NOW, when you have full health? What about the reverse, would it be worth going for a power attack at low health just to make that ration more worthwhile? It's neat, I dig it.
Your narrative frame here is that you're an adventurer from some faraway land, invading the Necropolis for unknown(possibly forgotten) reasons, venturing into it's depths at the behest of the Brazen Head, a cool-ass pyramid with an eye whose hobbies include demeaning you, berating you, chastising you and making wisecracks about stuff which supposedly happened in places.
And it's a good thing those wisecracks are funny, because there's a lot of them. Between the Brazen Head's quips, item descriptions and messages on the wall, Necropolis is all about these snippets of worldbuilding, popularised by the Souls series, evoking the same sense of puzzling together parts of a story while also royally taking the piss out of the format with silly jokes, and a setting not nearly as bleak and depressing as, say, Lordran.
Compared to others of the genre, Necropolis' Roguelike elements are quite thin. Your runs will be mostly defined by the equipment you pick up, which comes in 4 tiers and covers an armour set, 2 weapons and 2 pieces of off-hand equipment (usually a shield). Enemies drop the weapons they use when made dead, which offers a nice catch-up mechanic if you've been unlucky with drops, and severely lessens the feeling of being fucked over by RNG that you can sometimes get from Roguelikes. But the lack of variety in how your character can turn out does make for a game without nearly as much longevity as many other games in it's genre.
What Necropolis has is great. But there's not a whole lot of it. It's had one major update in it's lifetime which added the Brute as a second character option, which does add a lot if you're the type to want to finish the game with both characters(the Brute also has different movesets for every weapon, so they really feel different to play as), but it's still an incredibly small game on the content side. With a simple dose of more stuff it could probably stand as one of the best in the genre, but as it is it lacks the legs for that.
I'd still recommend it, but if you're going in, know you aren't going to be spending as much time in the Necropolis as you would, well, any other Roguelike.
So yeah, Necropolis. Super good, but super small. A lovely vacation of a game.
Next up, well, I've a lot of my plate and it's holiday season. I'm juggling Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness and Final Fantasy XV, plus a myriad of other, significantly smaller ventures accumulated in the steam sale.
Comments
Post a Comment