Any long time reader of the site is aware of my love for Shadowrun. It is no surprise then that I have followed Harebrained Schemes closely. And while I have certainly enjoyed the recent trilogy of Shadowrun games, the truth is that they were mediocre titles at heart that were elevated by my love for the franchise. When I saw Necropolis at PAX last year I was interested. A strange mixture between Dark Souls and a rogue like, Necropolis looked like it had potential if it could avoid some of the pitfalls of the roguelike genre. Unfortunately in practice those things haven’t quite come to pass.
The easiest way to describe Necropolis is as a rogue-lite game with a combat system that is reminiscent to Dark Souls. You play as a blackguard, looking to explore a giant shifting labyrinth built by some sorcerer for reasons that are not clear to anyone. Ostensibly you are looking for treasure, but you start to look for the exit pretty much as soon as you get there. As soon as you enter you will see scrawled on the opposite wall from the entrance, the control layout. As you approach a voice will exclaim something to the tune of “behold the sacred control layout”. This sets the tone for the whole game which is fairly flippant, almost mocking tone with the promise of something going on beneath the surface, that never seems to pay off.
The level design in Necropolis leaves a lot to be desired. Since they are randomly generated, you will be wondering through different types of tile sets, which will compose the different floors of the Necropolis. While there are fixed “themes” for the levels, they change every time, and that robs them of a lot of the charm. They are by and large, empty, and soulless. It is also very easy to get lost in them. The game will allow you to craft a chalk that you can use in case you get lost, and in later levels you might end up using it a lot. It speaks of how bland the design truly is.
The crafting system will allow you to craft just about anything, perhaps most important, rations, which serve two purposes. As the game progresses, your blackguard’s stamina bar will start to deteriorate, meaning you have less stamina to perform actions with. This can be replenished with food. Food also heals health, which is clearly important for combat. Once you realize how to craft food, it becomes somewhat trivial to make sure that you are stocked up with the supplies you need. In fact, I’ve sometimes eaten food when I could have waited a bit just to make room in my inventory for other items that enemies dropped.
Enemies will drop special potions and magic scrolls that must be identified. All of them will drop their weapons, but occasionally you will get special weapons from rare drops. Finding one of these weapons can be a boon that makes the game that much easier. But like everything else, they are random. A lot of times they seem to duplicate as well. It is even worse for armor, which are even more sparing drops that only come from treasure chests, and they seem to only spawn duplicates. A lack of exciting equipment management is a problem because despite being inspired by Dark Souls, the combat does not have anywhere near enough depth to carry the gameplay on its own.
Aside from the different move sets of the weapons, and the stamina system, there really isn’t much more to the combat in Necropolis. There is no dual wielding, or two handing. You cannot back stab, and while there is a parry, it lacks the weight of and feeling of the move in Dark Souls. The pace is faster than souls, but also a lot more imprecise. Enemy AI isn’t great either. They get caught in terrain and will follow you endlessly, which makes it easy to separate and attack them one by one. In an interesting move, enemies seem to have factions, and if they meet they will attack each other. This goes a long way to making the Necropolis feel like a living system, and can be used to get enemies to fight each other. They also hurt each other when they hit, so that means that when they are bunched together, they will hurt each other. With the shoddy AI this happens very, very often. Sadly, this means that the combat is very easy, and it relies on throwing a lot of enemies at you for difficulty. After the first couple of runs, I only died in one way. I would wonder into a room that had an outrageous number of enemies, and I would die trying to run around the level while trying to take on all of them at once, as they will chase me relentlessly. This means clearing a level can take a while as you run back and forth separating enemies as best you can so you can advance, which means that deaths are all the more frustrating.
When you die you will go back to the beginning of the game with very little permanence between runs. I hope you don’t get attached to any weapon you pick up because its gone. This means having to go back to the earlier levels, which at the beginning might not seem like a big deal, but the truth is that after a few runs these early levels become very easy to clear. But they can still be time consuming, especially if you get lost. Being lost in an area that is easy is boredom distilled. The best rogue-lites have some permanence that gives the player progress when doing runs. Binding of Isaac has a plethora of unlockables, including some items that can straight up break the game. Others have shortcuts that will help the player advance to those later levels faster. There’s very little of that to be found in Necropolis.
That’s not to say that the game doesn’t have SOME persistence between rounds, the most notable of which are the codexes that you can unlock. These are tomes that give you some special abilities such as more knock back for your attacks, or the ability to eat rotten food. But you can only equip one of them at the time, and they must be purchased with tokens, rather than found or unlocked in a fun way. Tokens are earned by completing specific tasks, such as killing a determined amount of a specific enemy, or eating a specific amount of food, and as a reward for the performance of the run. You can get a fair amount per run, though the game does let you spend them between floors to buy items. Items that, by the way, you’ll never get to keep when you die, which makes unlocking them feel like it’s not even worth it. It makes you choose between giving up an ability you really like to “advance” in the game.
In the end the main problem Necropolis has is that its just not very fun to play. Every design decision seems to be made in the most annoying way possible. Waves of heavily armored enemies. Long, boring levels that are easy to get lost in, no real talent tree to speak of. And perhaps worst of all, having to trudge through the boring early levels every time you die. This game follows the same trend of mediocrity we’ve become accustomed to seeing with Harebrained Schemes. The concept is good, and there are things to like in the game, but it just feels like they are missing the time and the design savvy to make it a truly great title. Hopefully in the future Harebrained Schemes will find the missing ingredient to making truly great games.
Necropolis is currently selling for $30. I consider this an outrageous amount. If you want a cool rogue-lite, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is currently selling for $15. If you want a good roguelike with survival, Don’t Starve is selling for $15 , and if you want a souls game, Dark Souls is $20 and Dark Souls 2 is $40. This game is simply not worth the investment. If you are curious enough to buy it, I urge to wait until its on sale, but frankly I’d skip this one completely.
