Today we are going to take a look at Sword of the Necromancer. This dungeon-crawling RPG with a bit of roguelite elements promises to provide you with the combat you love from dungeon-crawlers with the ability to raise the dead. Whether it can deliver on this promise is the question we will try to answer today. Sword of the Necromancer is available on Steam for 14 Euro and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Once upon a time, a guy lived who decided to fight the gods. And he won easily. Somehow. With his victory, he gained the power to raise the dead. He took this magical power and embodied it into his sword. But while he had the power to raise others he did not have the power to stay alive himself. So, upon his death, he and his sword were buried in a tomb. Under any normal circumstance, you’d probably avoid the dark place where the necromancer is buried but you need to revive someone, so you go in to get the sword.

As you can see, the story of Sword of the Necromancer is not exactly great. It’s not even a B-movie plot, more of a C-movie plot and the way it’s presented doesn’t really help it either. The pictures that show you previous conversations just don’t do it for me and I often just felt like skipping over them. Luckily, the story is not the focus of the game.

Just as in any other dungeon-crawling game in Sword of the Necromancer will introduce you to a lot of fighting hordes of enemies in several different levels of the Necromancer’s tomb. These get procedurally generated but here… the game doesn’t really deliver well. The rooms are very similar and often will like playing the same thing over and I’ve even encountered the same rooms in rapid succession.

And I don’t have good news on the monster front either. They most vary in their specializations so you’ll encounter many of the same mobs just doing slightly different things. At least the difficulty curve is done quite right. While you’re getting stronger the monsters get as well.
What I didn’t like at all was the loot. There are these chests located in every fourth room but over-all the loot just was boring. Yeah, you’ll find the typical items that increase your stats and there’s even an improvement system but the items just didn’t feel impactful enough.

So far, you haven’t heard anything I wouldn’t say about any other roguelite dungeon-crawling gamer, right? Well, the one new and kind of cool thing is your ability to raise fallen enemies as your minions. Just come close to an enemy and suck him into your sword. It’s quite a neat mechanic which would feel much more awesome if there was more variability to the enemies.

The graphics are pixel-art as you probably noticed from what you’re seeing. It does fit the game well but it just wasn’t mind-blowing or anything. The soundtrack is average at best and the game did function well from the technical side of things.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: Sword of the Necromancer is such an average game that it's almost amazing. It’s not bad. But there’s really nothing that exciting about it. An average story you’ve heard a million times, decent graphics that need that WOW factor, gameplay that has a few cool ideas but lacks in variability. All of this for 15 bucks. I’d say no. There are better games available for this price.

So, that’s it for today guys. I hope you liked the review and if you did, please up-vote the review, follow my blog, and be sure to share it with your friends. And comment, if you have anything you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page