Necropolis’ roguelike adventuring will kill you not-at-all softly

On paper, the pitch for dungeon-delving video game Necropolis sounds pretty off-putting: a roguelike, permadeath-loaded spin on Dark Souls, in which friends can inadvertently kill each other when they team up in co-op. Specifically, its off-putting nature is two-fold. If you’re not a hardcore gamer, that sentence is gobbledygook, but if you are a hardcore gamer, you’ll look at that pitch with appropriate trepidation. You can’t just slam all of those words together and get a fun, functional game… can you?

The bad news is that a single session of Necropolis won’t answer those doubts. Harebrained Schemes’ first foray into the roguelike genre relies on a few too many random-content-generation tropes that don’t all lend themselves well to an action-RPG that revolves around giant dungeons, heavy swords, and surprise monster attacks.

The worse news comes if you let Necropolis infect your brain in a “just one more” capacity. If you give the game enough of a chance, you’ll uncover just enough systems that do work to make the dedication worth the pain. But perhaps only barely.

Wizard needs food badly

These baddies have a spinning electricity attack, and it’s not fun to deal with.

These baddies have a spinning electricity attack, and it’s not fun to deal with.

Special attack on a glowing spider.

Special attack on a glowing spider.

Not every potion is created equal.

Not every potion is created equal.

Special attack on a glowing spider.

Not every potion is created equal.

I’ve yet to face this creature in the Necropolis, and I’m not sure that I want to.

Armor is hard to come by, but it usually looks pretty sweet.

Time to mess some ghost knights up.

Your starting arsenal is pretty wimpy.

Harebrained Schemes generally traffics in games loaded with plot and carefully developed characters, but you won’t find those things here. Necropolis drops players into a randomly generated dungeon and tells them to descend to its very bottom—a theme that’ll sound plenty familiar to fans of modern roguelike hits like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac—with only a puny sword and wooden shield in hand.

The game’s controls pretty much mimic From Software’s Souls games. Tap your controller’s bumpers and triggers to pull off “quick” and “fierce” attacks, respectively, and be mindful of animation times for both. Like in the Souls games, your sword thrusts, shield shoves, and arrow launches will lock your character into a full, sometimes slow motion, which enemies can take advantage of by punishing you should you miss. You also get a dodge-dash button, which you’ll want to rely on at all times.

Necropolis mixes up the formula with a tweak to the “stamina” bar, which controls how many major actions (sword swipes, dodge dashes) a player can do at once before having to take it a little easier. Here, the bar’s maximum will whittle down a bit after most actions. This sets the table for the game’s best control-related twist: a charged-up attack for both “quick” and “fierce” moves. You’ll get a killer, screen-clearing maneuver if you charge for a couple of seconds, but doing so will sap your stamina max and force you to eat stamina-refilling food sooner, which you can’t do mid-battle without exposing yourself to attacks. It’s a smart risk/reward addition to the control scheme.

You’ll definitely need that extra charge-power option. Giant battles shine thanks to some very satisfying monster variety, which players will enjoy tearing through with smooth controls and solid weapon options. Once a wave of foes descends, players will have quite a time making sense of the crowd’s different speeds, battle styles, attack animations, and mixes of melee, distance, and area-of-effect attacks. Weak spiders and grunts will rush players, while shield-bearing knights will prove annoying with a mix of effective blocks and predictable sword-spin attacks. At this point, even crazier super-foes will appear with some serious five-part attack swipes that must be accounted for while the other annoying grunts trade blows and laser shots all around you.

These sharp-angled, Sega Saturn-looking monsters look danged cool, and they’re set off by a similar aesthetic all around in the game’s randomly generated dungeons. Robotic knights, bearded ghouls, and spiders made of skulls are just some of the delightfully macabre beasts that will terrorize you throughout your many delves into the game.

To clarify: you will absolutely die, and every time you do so, the game starts over from the beginning in roguelike fashion, complete with newly generated worlds. When that happens, say goodbye to all of the stuff you acquired up until your death, including weapons, potions, and recipes (you’ll need the latter to craft better food and items as the game gets tougher). The only exception is the game’s persistent inventory of special, hard-to-earn coins that you use to purchase stat-boosting “tomes” that stick around for future delves. These offer enjoyable, subtle bonuses (dash-rolls that use less stamina, slightly higher defense stats, etc.) that don’t magically make the game “easy” to beat, especially since you can only have one tome activated at a time.

You won’t always like this roguelike

Where Necropolis falters most is its pacing. The best roguelikes find a sweet spot in offering repetitive, play-a-lot-to-master gameplay, with Spelunky standing out as a king in the genre thanks to its tight, precision-based take on Mario run-and-jumping—not to mention the fact that no matter how its levels are auto-generated, they always give players something to do with its systems. For nearly every beat of that game, you can expect a tough jump, a crazy spread of deadly spikes to navigate, or an obvious “how am I going to run past all of these monsters ahead of me” sequence.

At its best, Necropolis‘ automatic dungeon generation boosts its tight battling core. You’ll find a room where the geometry is on the baddies’ side, forcing players to account for ledges, rock formations, and other motion-blocking objects—all while adding hazards like spike traps and monster-spawn points—and come out of the battle shouting about how damned good that fight was. But for every one of those moments, you’ll find at least three more where you’re slogging through generic open rooms with pedestrian enemy waves. These would be fine if it was easy to run past the boring stuff, but the game’s crafting system feeds off of randomly dropped bits from killed enemies (there’s otherwise no XP or bonus from killing anything).

The other major thing missing from this randomly generated dungeon delve—which, as we all know, Diablo got right so many years ago—is a good number and frequency of loot drops. Necropolis feels great when it doles out a new, crazy weapon, and it has a lot of distinct options, each with interesting mixes of attack speeds and styles. But you can go through crazy-long sessions without stumbling upon much of anything. Good roguelikes have a pretty consistent system for placing enough randomly generated shops and treasure chests in an average playthrough to at least tease players with goodies, if not outright dole them out. Necropolis‘ random dungeons have proven a lot stingier in that regard.

Death with friends

Then again, neither Diablo nor Dark Souls has ever attempted this kind of multiplayer co-op experience—one with Souls-like, heavy-weapon mechanics and friendly fire turned on by default. Necropolis fires on all cylinders when players test its drop-in, drop-out co-op mode—which really does work as advertised, meaning it’s very easy for anybody on your Steam friends list to join up, no matter how far along you are in a dungeon delve—but this portion feels like it’s one or two patches away from perfection.

Unlike my pre-release test of the game, the launch version of Necropolis just doesn’t feel tuned for good multiplayer times. Enemy waves don’t consistently grow or shrink either in size or in power based on the number of players, and treasure opportunities don’t scale with a larger group, either. The game’s pacing issues are only more glaring in this scenario, which may be a major casualty of the game’s drop-in, drop-out friendliness. Can the game smartly repopulate its world with more stuff once a third or fourth player randomly appears?

I sure hope so, because the game’s enemy and weapon variety is even more fun to tear through when your co-op partners factor into a giant battle. When Necropolis dumps a ton of tough baddies into a room and everybody in your four-player session has microphones, there’s really no other comparison point in terms of thrill factor. Your own attacks (especially the charged, area-of-effect ones) can decimate teammates if you don’t wield them wisely, but your co-op teammates give you a real fighting chance to actually get through some of the game’s most brutal battles. Thankfully, the game offers a Gears of War-styled “revive” mechanic so that living players can bring their dead comrades back to life—but it still feels brutally tough, because even one player going down during a big battle can spell doom for the remaining fighters.