Necro Story Review

Not a Love Story

A sophomore slump is a period of uncertainty that can occur after a successful debut performance. After having previously enjoyed Belgian Indie studio Rablo Games’ debut title, Healer’s Quest, I found the Necro Story initially suffering from that sophomore slump before hitting its stride in the latter half of the game. With a fast and exciting battle system, Necro Story is a fun game, but there are more than a few things that hold it back from being a really good one.

Necro Story sees players taking control of a necromancer that has been sleeping for a few years. During that time, they missed out on battles that spanned the globe and completely decimated the human population. Players are tasked with bringing back the humans with the help of the mischievous ghost, Vivi. It’s a decent enough premise and works well for a game set half on Earth and half in the underworld realms like Valhalla, Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. The game flows naturally between overworld areas and dungeons, and story-wise is paced very well. One of the highlights of the exploration is the small hints placed around. Sign posts tell you which direction to go at forks in the road for a treasure as opposed to the area exit, and additional signs are hidden around that show paths to take to make additional treasure appear. They’re all cleverly placed, but not too obscure, often just requiring players to determine which trees or rocks the small hint points towards walking around.

Signs point the way towards treasure, while the small drawing above the necromancer’s head shows the path to take around obstacles to make the treasure appear.

One of the negative aspects of Necro Story unfortunately rears its head right from the start. Rablo’s first game, Healer’s Quest, has a bevy of incredibly witty and hilarious exchanges between all its characters from the very start, and that is continued in Necro Story… sort of. Sadly, all the best dialogue is heavily weighted to appear in the second half of the game. Necro Story is about recruiting defeated monsters into the player’s party; it’s a monster-collecting game. Thus there are basically only the player character and ever-present ghost, Vivi, as speaking characters for the first few hours. The recruited monsters don’t talk, and with the human population wiped out, the first half of the game is quite a slog without much humorous dialogue to help it along. Once players enter the second half of the game in the various underworld realms, multiple new Vikings, Valkyries, angels, and demons provide a great deal of colorful dialogue to humorously carry the story along. The humor is a highlight for sure, but unfortunately all but absent in the first half of the game.

The battle system in Necro Story is another highlight that blessedly stays engaging throughout. While it’s primarily an auto-battler, with up to eight captured or conjured monsters battling enemies, the player controls the necromancer and can cast a variety of spells on cooldown. Throughout the game, there are a maximum of twenty spells for players to find or learn by leveling up. All spells fall into one of five categories: affliction, darkness, life-stealing, summoning, or dark pacts, and players can equip up to six as the story progresses to bring into any given battle. Each spell has its own skill tree that players earn points towards upgrading, with some upgrades only becoming available once a certain number of points have been allocated towards specific categories of spells. Players are free to mix, match, and diversify their types of magic as much as they’d like, but more powerful upgrades await those who choose to focus on fewer types.

As battles can be chaotic and hard to follow specific monsters’ actions, the screen at the end shows not just experience gain, but who did how much damage.

The battle system flows quickly and players are always kept fully engaged either casting spells, summoning monsters, or collecting defeated spirits. As a fun bonus, extra experience is earned when every defeated spirit in a battle is collected. When enemies are defeated, their spirits can be absorbed to boost MP or captured to become new party members. While not super deep by any means, there’s a decent amount of granular things to do with the party. Each captured monster can level up and learn new skills, and while it’s an auto-battler, players can edit the frequency the monsters cast spells or use skills in menus between battles. Monsters can also equip two items to enhance their stats or skills while the necromancer can equip various staffs for the same effect.

The visual style that Necro Story presents is quite a unique one. It’s nicely stylized with everything seeming to appear like it’s been painted with an airbrush. The monster designs are not super-unique, with anthropomorphized animals and objects mixed in with standard mythical creatures. They’re animated nicely without standing out as memorable. Much of the same can be said for the music in the game. The tracks match the feeling given off by the various locations and are pleasant enough to accompany the game without being memorable enough to hum along to when the journey is complete.

This demon in Hell provides some good chuckles, something the first half of the game was sorely missing.

Before concluding, it’s worth noting the game has quite a few little issues that definitely affect Necro Story negatively. The one that occurs most often, and most notably, is the significant slowdown that occurs in battles with greater numbers of enemies, primarily in areas where enemies summon spinning rock armor to surround them. These battles suffer from enough slowdown to make it difficult to target defeated enemy spirits as they float away; the game engine is chugging too hard to allow for accurate aiming. Necromancer clipping on the overworld when walking around is a persistent issue as well whenever players change the direction they are walking. Misgendered comments made towards the necromancer abound, with them being called both “he” or “she” seemingly randomly despite the gender chosen at the start. A few other little visual glitches appeared here and there, at least one preventing the reading of important text and leading to the belief the game had soft-locked. Finally, while not an error, the best ending of the game is unfortunately locked to players possibly making a choice at some point during the playthrough. It’s something players won’t notice when it happens, but will definitely recall when reminded of it when it rears its ugly head at the worst possible time.

For a game that takes under ten hours to beat, Necro Story provides some entertaining moments while respecting the time of its players; it’s paced well for the scope of the game and the story it’s telling. The battle system and second-half humor are definite highlights and made me glad that I gave the game a try. However, a pretty bland first half, a bevy of little bugs, and a conclusion that is more likely than not going to end badly hold the game back from being a whole-hearted recommendation.

Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.

Scores
BATTLE SYSTEM
    
INTERACTION
    
ORIGINALITY
    
STORY
    
MUSIC & SOUND
    
VISUALS
    
'Average' -- 3.0/5
nsw
UNDER 20 HOURS
ADJUSTABLE

Fun, fast battle system

Humor is well-written and lands well, however...

There's a severe lack of humor in first half of the game

Glitches and slowdown affect gameplay

Best ending is locked behind a choice players don't know they're making

plattym3

Matt Masem

Matt joined RPGamer as a staff member in 2018 after being a long-time fan of the genre and the RPGamer podcasts. He loves anything Dragon Quest as well as a good turn-based or DRPG grind session.

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