Necropolis is a third person roguelike game developed by Harebrained Schemes, and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, releasing on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in July 2016. Harebrained schemes have a fairly well-known repository of games in their history with the le Shadowrun series of games being their most notable. Necropolis is set in a procedurally generated dungeon that changes shape each time you play.

First of all the art style on the show for this game really peaked my interest upon seeing it on the store page. It has a cartoony look to it that also has very dark and mysterious undertones. It completely grabbed me as one of the game’s stronger aspects after playing. Whilst the game’s world and environment are fairly low quality in terms of texturing and design, it still passes the mark due to the very stylized look and feels. Character and enemy models are again very basic, but due to the style, you can overlook the lack of serious detail. The game does have minimal sound effects; none that really stick in your mind, and the same can be said for the rather bland soundtrack too. We get a cheap-out way of avoiding voice acting by just having some monster mumbling over the top of any text you see on screen; this does come across as very boring and lackluster as it was quite clearly done to avoid having to include proper voice acting for the narrator.

Roguelikes and rogue-lite games are usually right up there with my favorite genre of video games. Thus I was super hyped to try out Necropolis, not only was I was drawn in by the game’s art style, but the thought of having a fleshed out roguelike that had a premium price tag also garnered my interest. Most roguelike games we see released nowadays are in the $10-$20 range so given that Necropolis is way above that I had extremely high expectations. Unfortunately with high expectations comes large amounts of disappointment. The game has a similar gameplay to that of Dark Souls in that it is slow paced and takes on the harder difficulty levels. Having hard game play is not the problem here; it’s the fact that the slow gameplay locks you into doing any sort of action until it has completely played out the animation which will more than likely leave you being smashed on by hoards of enemies in the meantime.

The game also lacks any proper progression system, roguelikes are meant to be played over and over again, each time you will get a little bit further than the last due to having a constant improvement in between runs. You do get some sort of bonus at the end of a run, but this only enables you to purchase very boring and unexciting passive abilities in the form of tomes, these passive benefits can be things such as reduced stamina usage when attacking, and a 5% health regeneration between fights. I would really like to see action abilities, or equipment improvements and definitely more interesting passive abilities that you exciting to be getting an upgrade.