Sword of the Necromancer

With nothing to offer besides some pleasant storytelling, we cannot recommend Sword of the Necromancer on any meaningful level. It's not horrible, but it's bereft of both meaningful content and any manner of unique execution. A sequel or heavily-modified relaunch could salvage the game into something much stronger, as the core idea of resurrecting fallen monsters is a decent one, but its treatment here renders it irrelevant. What a shame. This could have been something special. It's not a complete and total disaster – occasionally, when the screen is a little busier, you might feel a flicker of engagement as you dash between combatants – but overall, we'll be leaving this one for dead.

While complaints can be leveled at Sword of the Necromancer based on repetition, that doesn't mean that it's bad.

Sword of the Necromancer is a tight, atmospheric action RPG that doesn’t overstay its welcome. The mechanic of turning your foes into your friends is brilliant and keeps the dungeon crawling fresh every time you find a new monster to resurrect. It’s a game that rewards you for being aggressive, but gives you the settings to tweak the difficulty if you don’t want to lose everything on death. If you want a hack-and-slash with a grim twist and plenty of loot to upgrade, this is a journey worth taking.

While far from perfect, Sword of the Necromancer is a surprising gem that came out of nowhere. It has its charm and while not a fan of the genre, the Zelda mixed with rogue-like works; short levels make it work, and the fact that you can disable some of the rogue elements gives the game a chance to reach a broader audience beyond those who love the rogue genre. Sure combat isn’t perfect and there’s a bit of repetition, but if you’re looking for a classic Zelda clone on Xbox, albeit a bit shorter, you can’t go wrong here.

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.

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.

Sword of the Necromancer offers some new ideas, however they are just so minor that the game just doesn't stand out from its competition at all.

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.

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.

There is a soul in Sword of the Necromancer, it is clearly a game made with love and care. Unfortunately though, gameplay feels very limited and repetitive especially when compared with other, far better games. Its not really engaging to play, which is the most important aspect of a video game.