This April, Brace Yourself Games released Crypt of the NecroDancer, an ingenious fast-paced turn-based strategy RPG that has been getting some of the highest user ratings ever on Steam. These guys took the time to provide a good, full soundtrack since the music is a crucial part of the game. As a big fan of Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, I was really excited to give this game a try.
Story In the title sequence, we watch as Cadence, the main character, takes a fall into a hole in a graveyard, where a creature takes out her heart and curses it, causing her heart to beat like the beat of a song. As you complete zones with the various characters, you get to see more cut scenes that progressively reveal the plot, providing some motivation and making the game more interesting.
Gameplay The genius of Crypt of the NecroDancer is that as you travel further and further down into the crypt, you must defeat creatures using your weapons in turn-based fashion, but each turn only lasts for one beat of the music, something that really keeps things moving and provides great structure for the game. Each creature moves with the music according to its own pattern, which is what helps you know how to defeat it. When there are multiple enemies in a room, you have to think quickly to keep yourself safe while taking your enemies down. In the first zones, remaining stationary for one beat of the music will cause your coin multiplier to go back down to one so that defeating an enemy will yield less of a reward, which is a modest setback. In later zones, standing still causes additional problems – for example, standing still on a hot tile or stepping on two hot tiles in a row will cause you damage.
As you travel down through the crypt, the tempo of the music increases, which increases the game's difficulty since you'll have slightly less time to think each turn. Each floor of each zone, except for the last one, has a shop with a shopkeeper (who does an awesome job of singing along with the music) where you can purchase helpful items. These include pieces of armor, rings with special abilities, spells, weapons, digging tools, food to gain health, gear that allows you to hold another weapon or item, and more. Weapon upgrades are very useful and will change the way that you play against certain enemies or handle a room. Different weapons have different ranges and there are also weapons classes. For instance, all gold weapons temporarily increase the damage they deal right after picking up gold from another defeated enemy. Some items can be found in chests located throughout the levels as well. You can also find diamonds throughout the crypt – your ticket to buying permanent upgrades or unlocking items to use after you die.
Whenever you fail to make it to the end of a zone (consisting of multiple floors) and defeat the boss, you’ll have to start that zone over from the top, so these permanent upgrades are important. The bosses are well thought out, each one with a theme matching their music and featuring unique movements not shared by any other creature. My favorite boss was the chess boss – the gameplay being the way it is, it made so much sense for him to be there. I would say he's the quintessential Crypt of the NecroDancer boss. Though several of his chess pieces can move at once, everything else matches what you'd expect of a chess game, with enemies attacking only where they could in a real chess game.
Another useful tool besides items and upgrades is the training area. Training is almost a necessity against a certain enemies who you won’t have time to figure out during the real game. Other goodies in the game are mods, character selection, and custom music. Mods allow you to load up levels made by hand instead of the procedurally generated ones, or change the look of the game.
Selecting a different character will change a fundamental ability, but beating a zone with one character does unlock the next for a different character. Some character examples: Bard can move as fast or slow as you want him to without regard to the beat (which I think spoils the fun of the game except for some special puzzle-like side levels). Uncle Eli has a collection of infinite bombs (fun!) but he also can’t hold any normal weapons.
I think my favorite feature was the custom music option, as it's really fun to suddenly have a favorite song playing and everything in the level reacting to it, while keeping the structure of the game completely intact. It analyzes the beats of your selected music beforehand and does a pretty good job matching it. I liked playing to "Hanuman" by Rodrigo y Gabriela because it's really consistent, and the phrasing helped me time things. The built-in soundtrack is really good, but it can also be easier to tell when the end of the song is coming when you're using a song you know (you drop down a trap door when the song ends if you don't make it to the stairs). That said though, you can definitely artificially influence the difficulty of the game by choosing longer or slower songs. Even choosing one with a more relaxed feel could affect how you play.
Graphics and Sound The graphics in Crypt of the NecroDancer are purposely pixelated, and I actually liked the look and feel of it all. The cut scenes featured fuller resolution art which made them feel more special and worthy of extra attention. The only issue I had was that the title screen had a fairly long load time, but then again the load time for levels was nothing, which is probably a nice tradeoff.
The composer and sound designers did a good job with both the soundtrack and the effects. As I’ve said, the soundtrack really drives the game – it's an interesting mix of dance and guitar-heavy music, which the composer dubs “Spookhouse Rock”. Zone 3 was very interesting since different areas of the same floor would blend these two genres differently based on where you were standing. They did a good job of keeping the other effects percussive and/or in time with the music. It's interesting to see the team talk about this in their mini-documentary, which also covers other cool topics like how they came up with the main concept for the game. The voice acting, which was only needed in cut scenes and for sounds made by enemies, was occasionally humorous (maybe that’s because I can picture the guy in the video saying the lines), but very solid overall.
Other Crypt of the NecroDancer has a local co-op mode that allows a friend use the other side of your keyboard so that your two characters can tackle a room at the same time. There's a whole series of items in the game created for multiplayer use, though it bothered me that sometimes those items showed up in single player mode, where they were useless. It's also possible to hook up a DDR dance mat and use it with this game. This sounds fun, considering my history with that game, though I don’t think I could see myself spending hours on it to the point of actually making progress in or beating Crypt of the NecroDancer.
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thx
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Interesante
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