You know, it’s been well over a decade since I’ve been in a club. Necrobouncer caused some memories to resurface. Disliking loud music and lights – as well as grappling with social anxiety – made clubs rather unpleasant for me. Going to one for any length of time was like staring directly into the sun while someone drills into the pain centre of my brain with a Black & Decker. So I kind of relished the chance to smash up a club in Necrobouncer. Payback for the exorbitant cost of the drinks.
However, if I might skip to the end of this review somewhat, I feel like Necrobouncer doesn’t quite make the most of its concept. The word ‘bouncer’ conjures up certain ideas. Checking clothing smartness, admitting patrons and knocking the teeth out of drunken louts. While Necrobouncer can arguably claim to do the last one, it doesn’t bother with the others. The general theme begins to fall apart quickly. We’re left with a game that feels like a ‘greatest hits’ album. Perfectly enjoyable, but struggling to carve an identity of its own.
You On The List?
Necrobouncer opens with our hero, a green fiery fella, waking up after what looks like one hell of a bender. Evidently what he was drinking was so strong that it completely wiped his memory. Through the hangover mind fog, he realises he’s in the basement of a club and stumbles into the lift. On the top floor is the bartender, who promptly gives him a job as a bouncer. So, he goes back down to begin the first stage of his bouncing job: smacking the teeth out of patrons with his staff.
That’s about it as far as plot goes, but it’s mainly a set up to get us progressing through the various levels. The combat itself feels quite good. We have a standard melee attack and a ranged attack, for starters. While these don’t have much feel to them in terms of impact, enemies are numerous and squishy, making carving through them pretty satisfying. There are also nice skills on top, like summoning zombies or turning into a giant ball and rolling around. I used zombies a lot and I like that there are a ton of unlockables that improve them. The combat isn’t complex, but it’s satisfying enough.
Which is good, as combat is Necrobouncer‘s bread and butter. It uses the standard roguelike formula of a series of various rooms leading up to a boss. It does try to innovate in this area, though. You start with basic combat rooms but as you play, you unlock more interesting variants. There’s one that requires you to knock pillars into corresponding holes in a time limit. Too slow and enemies spawn. It’s a nice brain-break from just hitting things, even if these rooms are a touch too easy, giving a slight difficulty inconsistency – though Necrobouncer allows you to swap in modifiers to properly tune the difficulty, mitigating that somewhat.
Very Impudent Person
Presentation-wise, Necrobouncer does have quite a few bits going for it. It’s got a nice soundtrack, for one. An often underrated element but in a roguelike, you’re going to be hearing the tracks a lot, so a good OST is vital. It also looks fairly nice too. Everything is in a nice and crunchy pixel art style, and the colours are bright and colourful. There are nice little animation touches too. One enemy wiggles his eyebrows before dying. Enemy designs are decent as well, my favourite being an enemy that’s two shorter enemies in a trenchcoat. It can get a little hard to see what’s going on when fights get close, but our protagonist’s bright design helps.
But while all of these elements are nice, I can’t help but feel they are all elements that we’ve seen before. I was playing through Necrobouncer trying to pinpoint what the Unique Selling Point was. In some cases it could be an interesting world or story (like Dead Cells for instance), while in others it could be a unique gameplay mechanic. Necrobouncer struggles with both. The story is nearly absent, for one. There’s a cutscene before the final boss that talks like it’d built up intrigue. It claimed I was beginning to suspect something. I wasn’t. As for the gameplay, well, it feels like ‘Now That’s What I Call Roguelike’.
It’s a shame, because I feel like the premise has oodles of potential. Being a bouncer is more than hitting people, after all. I’m envisaging some sort of split-day mechanic (admittedly not rare), where we spend the start of the night checking people off the list of admittance and the end clobbering them through the floors. It’s either that or keep gameplay as is, but bring in the club mechanics a bit more. Have us mix up cocktails to get new abilities, with debuffs for mixing in absinthe. Go crazy with it.
Necrobouncer – Good Gimmick, Poorly Explored
As it is, Necrobouncer‘s main theme feels like a thin veener stretched over a stock roguelike. It can’t even stretch to the enemy designs, really. From angry peasants, which is fair enough, we move to knights and ice mages. One boss is just a straight-up shrine. Maybe it’s to Dionysus? Individually, the designs are quite nice but they just aren’t slotting together for me. It’s a pick’n’mix of enemy designs. Not a damning issue, but it makes Necrobouncer unlikely to stick in my head. The relatively short length at just four levels doesn’t help either.
Still, I don’t want you to take from this that Necrobouncer is bad. It’s not; not by a long shot. It’s fun to play, nice to look at and has a few respectable ideas in the gameplay. It prods no boundaries and pushes no envelopes. If you’re just in the market for a pleasant roguelike, then you’ll find a lot of fun in Necrobouncer. Sadly, despite an entertaining premise, it can’t carve itself an identity beyond that.
