Necromancer's Revenge

Dev abandoned game few days after release. He watched people buy the dozens buy it because they were really excited. It was over priced but they wanted to play it. He raked in the cash then 4 days after his windfall...he shut down discord, went dark on these forums here, and told me after I hunted him down..."I dont have time to make games". Well....he couldnt have thought of that before he took everyones money? Total scam, BUT if the dev comes back to the game someday....and gives it the same love the paying players gave it....I will be fair and change my review.

DISCLAIMER/CLARIFICATION: I think it's more effective to label this review as a Do Not Recommend because people are more likely to review it and put any stock into it. On top of that, it is a critique and my feelings are that this game needs a lot of development for me to feel like its worth picking up. I got pretty much all the current content in 2 10ish minute runs. Most of my play time was spent in the main screen or sitting in a menu texting someone. Whats here is good but there's not a whole lot of it by any stretch. There isn't really much to review at the moment. There's 2 maps and 3 sort of skill archetypes, mixing and matching 2 of the 3 into your available skill pool. As things are now you pretty much max out all your skills by the end of the run. Once you figure out the way things operate and get used to the controls (or setup the controls so they're easier for you) its pretty straightforward. Totems and Summons are set to manual cast while Spells are set to autocast by default. I haven't played with a Summons build, but Spells feel really powerful for not having to micromanage them and Totems kinda feel like you just spam them until you're out of mana then wait for it to recharge. You start with one summon as your first skill and from the way my first run went I assume summons will work the same as totems. Micromanaging seems like it would get annoying but the differences between one skill or another seem pretty minimal and I feel like you can spam any one of them and not have any issues. As far as meta progression goes, there's not a lot here atm and I don't know what is planned. It doesn't seem that you have to spend a resource unlocking any of the skills you don't start with (just totems and summons, I think you start with all the current spells) and I was able to unlock all of the totems and most of the summons after my first run. I did one run for each map and a significant portion of the second map i was paused and texting my friend, my total play time is about an hour so there's not a whole lot of content at the moment. The second map doesn't even have a boss it just ends when the timer reaches 0. When you kill stuff theres a few different orbs they can drop. Blue is your in-run shop resource, which spawns in the first map but not the second. Green Orbs are xp, Gold Orbs which seemed to drop in the second map only as far as I could tell don't seem to have any use currently and I think they'll be used either to purchase more skills later when added to the game or for meta progression trees, or both. Lastly there's red orbs which act as a different currency you use to open up what are effectively treasure boxes that respawn on a timer. Their cost to open goes up each time and the cooldown on them increases. They can give you a random skill or two from the pool at a random rarity and you can have multiple of the same skill (not sure that has any use whatsoever for summons and totems as the cooldowns are low enough to spam and also having a lower level of the same skill just seems worse than having a different skill at a higher level.) From what I can tell if you have your skill slots full then it gives you a random skill that matches the rarity of what you have so that they upgrade to the next rarity. Sometimes it does not give you a skill, it also has full heal and full mana regen potions. Final note on the orbs is that blue ones don't drop in the second map because instead of a treasure box and a shop like the first map, there's just 4 treasure boxes (they operate independently of each other so opening one doesn't affect the cost and cooldown of the other 3) The shop is pretty straightforward and I don't feel its worth talking too much about. It opens on a cooldown, you can spend your blue orbs, it sells skills in your pool at various rarities and you can pay to reroll it once. They also sell full health and mana potions for 50 orbs each (a trivial price.) While the shop is on cooldown you are able to enter it again to purchase anything that was rolled. After the cooldown it rolls into a new selection. Level ups feel mostly inconsequential at the moment. A lot of them feel like placeholders or arbitrary due to the low difficulty ceiling. I didn't feel like I needed HP increases, any of the spawn rate cooldown options (one each for each archetype of skill, again I don't think they do anything relevant for summons and totems, not sure if they matter for spells either.) Move speed is always good because it means you can avoid stuff but there isn't that much to avoid aside from the map 1 boss attack. Magnet range is almost always a solid pickup in Survivor type games but here it just doesn't feel like it matters as things stand currently. Red Orb %incrase affecting how much you get from each pickup (currently 10 per I think) and it caps at 20 until you level it up with Red Orb Max Total increases which do not seem to increase it as much as they say they do. Its actually a pain and one of the most important upgrades you can get because the treasure boxes take an increasing amount to open each time which means after the 3rd or 4th opening you have to go to the box, dump in your orbs, then go collect a few more to refill and finish opening. They also have a field around the box that if you don't leave will not recognize you have more orbs to put in. Xp increase doesn't seem too meaningful either. The only upgrades I found myself really wanting to see more of were Max Mana and Mana Regen Rate bc those let you spam more stuff. As a final note, leveling up gives you a mana refill as well which is nice. For $5 I think its worth seeing what the developers have in store but I certainly think its hard to justify. I don't want to take money back from the devs if I'm using their product, but it currently stands as one of those "I'll play this so you don't have to" experiences. I'm willing to wait and see what the devs have in store and I think if it gets more fleshed out it could be worth picking up. I think what they've done with the level designs is interesting in the ways they make you play differently, even if the game choices are so inconsequential at this point that it doesn't matter. As it stands, I don't think I'd recommend this game but I also don't think it's deserving of a vote against it either.