Hands of Necromancy

First things first: The “Necromancy” giving the game its name is limited to 1 (rare) item that resurrects 1 enemy, which serves as a short-lived decoy. Necromancy is no core mechanic--shooting is. What you get is thus a basic boomer shooter, with spell-themed guns. For the price, it's rock-solid entertainment. With emphasis on “rock”--rather than “gem”. The game promises fun mechanics from spells to shapeshifting, which all sound fantastic, but sadly does too little with them. In practice, ammo for your “spell”-guns is so rare, that most of what you do with mechanics like shapeshifting is spend game time as a swamp snake, because it slowly regenerates its attacks, thus helping you conserve your more scarce resources. The enemy sprites in the game range from mediocre to very poor, with too little variety. During the first episode, you will encounter less than 10 different types, with even the bosses being a bigger gargoyle, the same of which you've seen before. After the first episode, the game recycles the formula from episode one for the next, and so on, with a text message that basically reads “you had _one_ king of the undead, but have you had a _second_ king of the undead?” Bottom line: For the price, you will get a good, if very basic, fantasy-themed boomer shooter with good-enough level design, that is best played in short bursts. You get as much polish as the price tag suggests. If that sounds fair to you, you can have some rock-solid entertainment with “Hands of necromancy”.

This game plays a lot like Hexen with lots of puzzles and hub level system but can long and tedious and repetitive at times also just like Hexen. Play slowly, take your time and pause for days or weeks between plays. Is gonna help make it less repetitive. I find when I come back feels a bit fresh again and I have to remember what I was doing and works well with Hexen type games for me. I think overall the design or game is quite interesting. The powerups are unique. Weapons are unique as well. Monster design quite interesting. Level design also pretty cool. All weapons are usefull and you begin with 2 weapons. For me the game monster/weapon/texture design feels a bit more like Heretic than Hexen a mishmash of different things put together but the level design is deffinitely Hexen.

Excellent title for GZDoom enthusiasts, particularly Hexen fans. A little light on polish but makes up for it with large, well designed levels just big enough to get lost in but not too lost. Enemies and weapons have large variety with some standout spells but nothing really overpowers anything else. All in all a very solid title with a lot of heart.

I saw this in the store for a bit and wrote it off because GZDoom. The game is great though. Definitely similar to Hexen with less cross-level change frustration and much better weapons.

The game started strong: The Hand of Necromancy powerup is a nice idea (resurrect your enemies to fight for you), some of the weapons are pretty inventive (the way the magic sword works is great). And changing between forms is really nice as well. I had no problem with the hub system or getting lost. But I'm almost through the second episode and I'm getting quite bored. You see the same enemies over and over. Most are pretty generic (ice man, stone man, wizard, gargoyle) and are not very well drawn or designed. The first boss was a major letdown - there was nothing special about him at all. The level design is okay but most of the levels aren't too memorable and they all mush together after a while. Even the changing between forms begins to just feel like equipping a different weapon/powerup. I think this is one of the cases where having a story (even a simple one) would help a lot in making me interested in continuing. But despite a promising intro, there is basically no story here. So I don't see the reason to continue - the gameplay loop is very standard Doom, and while I love that kind of game I really feel like it needs some interesting monsters, interesting story, interesting gameplay elements, or really good level design to keep my interest. It feels like the developers just started with "let's make a fantasy-themed GZDOOM game" instead of having a vision for some new and innovative game and executing it. It's not a bad game to play if you're desperate for another Doom-like, but just be warned it does get quite old after a while.