There’s a system for upgrading equipment, but it requires a huge time investment to grind materials-which are found in a completely random fashion from broken pots within the game’s dungeon. Death doesn’t incite excitement for another attempt so much as exasperation and the feeling of your time being wasted. That can work well, as the genre’s popularity has proven: with the right systems in place, be it some sort of passive permanent upgrades, story progression through death a la Hades, or even just a combat / gear system that means a new run is a new chance to play around with a new build, repeated death and retrying can be a big part of the appeal.īut Sword of the Necromancer doesn’t really have any of those things, so even though it’s not overly difficult, it can still be frustrating and tedious. Dying means losing all your items and a few (but not all) character levels, and starting the dungeon again from the first floor. Sword of the Necromancer is still a roguelike. The whole “monster meat shield” strategy is unreliable, anyway, and regular equipment seems more practical in the long run, further limiting the usefulness of the game’s most unique gimmick. If you decide to just use monsters as fodder-to act as a decoy for you, and cause as much bonus damage as they can before inevitably getting destroyed-you’ll go through them quickly, and you’ll inevitably get a chance to play around with different types as you keep replenish your horde with new recruits.īut even then, you’ll eventually run into the same problem: you get a monster that’s too strong or too useful to just let die, so its item slot becomes “locked”, and then another, and then another. A revived monster can be summoned and revoked at will, but while it’s fighting, it’s as susceptible to taking hits and getting killed as you are. As a result, every time you find something new, the question becomes “Am I 100% sure that this is going to be better than one of the things I’m already carrying?”, for which the answer is almost always “No”.ĭepending on your playstyle, monster resurrection can sometimes be a little bit more fluid, at least in the short term.
When you replace something you’re carrying with something you’ve found, the original item is immediately lost forever, so there’s no choice to take the new thing and try it out for a bit, leaving the old one lying on the ground ready to be reclaimed if you decide you don’t like the replacement. Once you’ve found a loadout that you like-which will usually happen before you even finish the first floor of the dungeon-there’s very little incentive to swap out something you’re familiar with for something you’re not. Weapons, magic spells, individual consumables, accessories with passive upgrades, and revived monsters each take up one of those item slots. The biggest issue is item space: you can only ever carry three items on you at a time (in addition to a basic sword), and those three spaces are used for everything. Sword of the Necromancer tries to follow that mold with a unique quirk-the ability to revive fallen enemies and use them as your minions-but it’s surrounding systems are too limited and too restrictive to ever let it really hit that roguelike sweet spot.
What makes the best of the genre work so well is the way they encourage experimentation with different weapons, different items, different builds-driven in part by necessity and in part by a game loop that gives you a good reason to not just stick to the same old thing. There’s a lot more to a good roguelike than just permanent death and randomised dungeons.