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Crypt of the NecroDancer Preview

A Dance with Dragons (and minotaurs, and skeletons, and blue slimy things)

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What I definitely can get up in arms about is the game's upgrade system. Remember that learning experience I was gushing about so insufferably? Well, it's tainted by the totally unnecessary process of unlocking all your equipment first. While exploring the game's dungeons you occasionally happen across diamonds – lying on the ground, embedded in walls, and carelessly left in vending machine coin-return slots – which will, once you return to the hub, allow you to buy new armour, weapons, rings, spells, and other miscellaneous bits of equipment, which will in turn proceed to be added to the pool of items that randomly appear in the dungeon. More insultingly, however, you can buy straight-up upgrades to Cadence that raise your base coin multiplier, increase your starting health, and drop more chests in the dungeon. This was a bad idea in Rogue Legacy and neither time nor circumstances have ripened it. The fundamental idea of a roguelike is that you, as a player, get better and better through constant practice until you are able to overcome the fickle whims of the random number generator, but permanent upgrades make a mockery of that. Why bother trying to beat this zone when you can just grind away until you've nearly tripled your health? I have similar gripes about unlocking equipment. I suppose the idea here was that you would be able to learn how your small starting pool of weapons and items works before gradually adding new entries to it, but while you do unlock equipment at a fairly swift pace – swift enough, in fact, to make the system's supposed purpose irrelevant – it's not so fast that it doesn't end up feeling like a serious grind by the end. There's just something ignoble about a roguelike that grows easier with time; it puts a black stain of doubt on any accomplishments one might otherwise be proud of. Did I really grow more skilful to the point where I could consistently take on zone two? Or was it just the six extra hit-points lowering the bar enough for me to daintily step over it?

Crypt of the NecroDancer

The great irony of all this is that even now, I'm still pretty hazy on a lot of items lying around in the dungeon. The cat o' nine tails, a sort of lunging weapon that hits nearby squares according to some mysterious arcane rule, is about as useful in my hands as a length of rotten driftwood, and the only reason I know the difference between the different shovels is because I went and looked them up. This ambiguousness extends to some of the enemies, too: for all my talk of patterns and elegant dances, I still for the life of me can't work out what kind of mad clockwork dictates the bats' movements. Seems like no matter what kind of roguelike I'm playing, bats are always the wild-card. You can, in fact, pay diamonds – more bloody diamonds, again! – to train against monsters, bosses and mini-bosses in a safe environment, which I thought was a nice touch – though it still doesn't help with the bats – but there's no such option to practice with equipment. I mean really, Necrodancer, why not? You might as well, since you're so hell-bent on finding things to spend my diamonds on. This really is one of those games where you have to consult a wiki if you ever plan to understand its exact mechanisms, which I've always felt is kind of a cop-out over, say, clear and intuitive design that makes itself apparent after a few encounters, but a roguelike with an enduring mystique is a roguelike that keeps me fascinated, so I think I can find it in me to forgive that.

Ultimately, Necrodancer wins me back with its hardcore mode, which throws away all those asinine upgrades, unlocks the full item pool, and puts up a global high-score board for one long push through all three zones in a row. I'd like to call it the 'real' mode and open the taps wide on my most sickening reserves of roguelike elitism, but that would be doing a disservice to the game's other modes: a Spelunky-esque daily challenge, a dedicated dance pad mode that makes the game slightly easier – you can still play it with a keyboard though, if you're a scumbag – and surprisingly, local two-player co-op. Sadly I couldn't find anybody to come over to my house and crowd around a keyboard with me so that we could play some game that they've never heard of, but it seems functional. Only one person needs to actually move on the beat in order to keep the coin multiplier going, so you might even be able to play it for more than five minutes without thinking murderous thoughts about your partner. There's also a limited selection of different characters (most of them still locked away by glaring 'work in progress' signs) who alter the gameplay in subtle ways and have their own associated high-score boards: Aria, who has one hitpoint and dies if she misses a beat, and is therefore perfect if you've recently had some cybernetic implants installed; Bolt, who has to move twice per beat (geddit, 'cause he has to bolt everywhere); and the Bard, who can move whenever he likes, making him the ideal choice if you want to subtract the single best thing about the game from the game for some mind-skewering reason.

Crypt of the NecroDancer

Alright, so 'single best thing' is a fairly close-run accolade. Second place just barely goes to the soundtrack, which is – without hyperbole – Danny Baranowsky's single greatest work to date. Yes, better than Super Meat Boy. I don't know a thing about electronic music, but this soundtrack makes me want to go learn about it just so I can elucidate how good it is. You know how chiptune fanatics go crazy for the VRC6 chip because it made the Famicom actually bearable to listen to? Well, just imagine that this soundtrack was written for some kind of hypothetical Super Nintendo chip that only ever existed in the imagination of a post-fever-dream Konami employee. It has synths within synths, hitting its absolute peak with the musically-themed boss fights: a game of speed chess against a blues bassist, a zombie conga line (presided over by a pedantic gorilla who enforces strict conga etiquette) and a heavy metal lich with a microphone on his scythe and a speaker embedded in his chest. That last one had better be on an album cover somewhere. You can also replace the music for the various levels with your own MP3s, but unless your chosen track has a strong, steady beat, the game is liable to just throw its arms up in the air in overwhelmed confusion. If it doesn't, then you certainly will.

I find it strange to think of Necrodancer in terms of Early Access. In spite of its glaring content deficit – not even having a final boss, I mean honestly guys – it feels like a complete, free-standing experience, well-worth its asking price. Everything that's there gives an intangible sense of having been polished, tested, tweaked, and polished again for good measure. Many Early Access purchases feel as if you're buying a game that's only seventy-five percent complete – or if you're unlucky, considerably less than that – but Crypt of the NecroDancer just feels like seventy-five percent of a game, sliced cleanly off the final product. I wouldn't blame you in the slightest if you wanted to wait until that final product was available, but what you get right now is an idea that works better than it has any right to, well-presented and challenging enough to make the most of its meagre content. Still, since I'm technically an alpha tester I ought to provide some constructive feedback, so here it is: make the bats more predictable, toss away the upgrade system, and give Danny Baranowsky a raise, Brace Yourself Games. Oh, and please mail an appropriately disguised dance pad to XXXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXX, XXXXXX [Ed. Note: Address redacted to avoid awkward mail deliveries]. Just for testing purposes, of course.

Comments
Crypt of the NecroDancer
Crypt of the NecroDancer box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Crypt of the NecroDancer
87%
Great
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Crypt of the NecroDancer is ranked #88 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #4 out of 110 games reviewed in 2015.
87. Bloodborne
PlayStation 4
88. Crypt of the NecroDancer
89. Wasteland 2
PC
Related Games
Cadence of Hyrule Cadence of Hyrule
Platform: Switch
Released: June 2019
Developer: Brace Yourself Games
Screenshots

Crypt of the NecroDancer
10 images added Aug 10, 2014 23:12
Videos
Crypt of the NecroDancer - Launch Tra...
Posted: Apr 19, 2015 13:27
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