Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower

Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower is a 2D side-scrolling platformer adventure based on the 8-Bit classic Castlevania.

The game casts you as a randomly-named, Conan-esque Barbarian who has no use for things like clothing or morals. There's a necromancer who lives nearby, he has gold, and the barbarian wants it. That's pretty much the plot.

The game wears its Castlevania inspiration on its sleeve, and everything from the character's sprites, backgrounds, and the game's controls are obviously taken directly from it's spiritual ancestor. The game plays in essentially the same manner as the 8-Bit Castlevania titles; you'll bash your way through undead, pick up sub-weapons, climb stairs, and fight your way to the boss while getting killed a lot. However, there are a few key differences. Unlike Simon Belmont, who wields a whip, your barbarian wields a great sword which can be upgraded in size and power. He'll swing the sword in an arc, instead of straight forward. This allows you to hit many enemies above you, whether by bug or feature. The other main difference is your barbarian can jump statically in place while Simon Belmont could only jump forward. This allows you to use jumping as a viable means to avoid projectiles, and there are a few places built into the game that allow you to take advantage of this.



So on a surface level, this looks just like a Castlevania game, but I feel like it misses the mark in a couple important ways. The game lacks any of the gothic charm that made Castlevania's environments a lot of fun to explore. Almost everything is a dull gray, even the water in the sewer is dull and dingy. While it can convey a bleak atmosphere, in a 2D platformer with no real story it hurts a bit not to have anything interesting to look at. People who yell more than I do have talked about this at length, but interesting use of color was key to making Castlevania's level design pop, but Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower borrows Castlevania's graphics without the same application of color theory, making the game look a bit washed out and makes the areas kind of bleed together. The game's sound design has similar issues where sounds bleed together and there aren't really any satisfying noises when you hit or kill things, or collect items.

The biggest problem I have with the game is its general level design. If you're familiar with Castlevania it probably won't surprise you very much to find out that this game is really hard. But I feel like it made things hard in the wrong way in a lot of places. The game has a lot of emphasis on tricky platforming, often while dodging or otherwise deflecting a lot of enemy projectiles. But the problem is your hero isn't equipped to deal with this kind of challenge. He's really slow, his jumping is very static, and he is in general not very agile. His sword can block most projectiles but it takes a while to wind up. This makes jumping and dodging at the same time an unfair challenge, but the game expects you to deal with this a lot, often with whole walls of projectiles being launched at you and often with moving platforms to deal with on top of everything else. To add insult to injury, these sections often take place over bottomless pits where one mistake equals death. Moving platforms cause other problems too, since they're slow moving and can force you to stand around waiting in a few places.

The also appears that either it wasn't tested thoroughly or that the designer really hates you. A few levels start you immediately facing down approaching enemies or projectiles, and since if you die you restart with no power-ups, you often can't kill the enemy quickly enough to avoid taking a hit due to your weapon being too weak. I've talked a bit lately about games feeling friendly, like it invites you in and wants you to have fun. This game feels like it wants to kick you when you're down and laugh at you.

The game is fair in one respect though, there are infinite continues and you can always restart from the beginning of the same room when you die, including the bosses. Unfortunately it feels like the game was made harder to compensate for this. Some people have this strange idea about old games, that if you take away the handicap of having to restart a whole level when you die you have to make it three times harder or the player will somehow feel robbed of the experience, but I don't really look back on the days of dying 80 times to the same boss with any kind of fondness or nostalgia.

In a lot of ways I'd describe this game as feeling like a Romhack of Castlevania, made by someone who didn't think the game was hard enough. And while it's possible maybe this game would feel really good and challenging to Castlevania grandmasters, my suspicion is that if probably feels more like someone made the game harder without really understanding the game's limits and what your character was really capable of, resulting in a game where you must be pixel perfect or perish.

It probably sounds like I've been pretty rough on this game, but I don't really think it's all the bad. I feel like there is a decent spread of areas where the challenge is just about right, it's just weighed down by a couple screens where the frustration got the better of me. If you like Castlevania and aren't scared off by a game that can get pretty mean, you might want to check this out. On the whole, however, I feel like this game could have been much better than it is, especially with so much to draw from.