Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower

Good night!
Yes, because today we will play Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower, a 2D side-scrolling platformer adventure inspired by the 8-Bit classic Castlevania. But this time it's not the night of the vampire, but the night of the necromancer. Uhm I guess this makes no difference since the result is always the same: lots of undead creature going around!

GameOverGames Productions created in 2014 this action platform game made with Game Maker Studio. It's a pretty simple game, since you just move with arrows, attack with the Z key, jump with C and use the secondary weapon pressing X... but you can remap the controls if you want, and that's always a good thing (by the way this game even contains a SCANNED manual in the download! For real!). It's worth noting that in this game our barbarian fights with a sword that strikes with an arch that hits also the enemies over the head, and unlike Belmont our hero can also jump vertically on the spot, a feature that will become useful to avoid projectiles in some situations.

In this game we play as a random barbarian, one who hates magic and loves gold, and for this reason he decides to plunder the tower of a necromancer that lives nearby. Ok so we're basically a burglar that is going to steal from a wizard, not really a hero, but we know that necromancers are usually bad guys, so I guess it's ok.


Each level ends with a boss battle and this is the first. Do not underestimate them... ouch! Too late!

Anyway things are never easy: to steal all the necromancer's money our barbarian has to traverse three levels: the entrance, the sewers and the tower itself, fighting lots of undeads, bats, strange creatures and also strong bosses, until he can meet and face the necromancer in a final battle.

The assets, as you probably guessed, are all ripped and edited from the earlier 8-bit Castlevania games, even if the recolouring in some cases could have used better shading, especially in the case of the protagonist. The colors are also pretty much dull and generic, but this is not too bad (the problem is that Castlevania had a distinct gothic charm that does not really fit with the fantasy barbarian theme, it was more appropriate a different setting, like the dark fantasy worlds of games like Barbarians or Rastan).

What in fact I found worse was the gameplay, and not because the game is difficult, Castlevania games were notorious to be difficult. The problem is that the character ia a bit stiff and not really agile, so sometimes you're going to take damage, no matter what. The game is also heavy on platforming, anyway to make things easier, it was made possible to have infinite continues that lets you restart from the same room or even boss battle, the only problem is that restarting also means losing all the precious power ups, that would be useful since in these situations you may start with a projectile or an enemy right in front of you. Sigh.

In any case the game is pretty short and I finished in less than a hour, even if I'm pretty bad. I guess that some good player can beat it in 20-30 minutes, there are just three levels and if you know what to do it does not last long. On the other hand I must say that music is very good, the soundtrack is all new and really appropriate to the game and atmosphere, great job for this particular aspect of the game.


The third level is really chaotic! When even the skeleton cook attacks it is time to flee (you do not need to eliminate every single undead after all)!

Final Verdict
Barbarians and the Necromancer's Tower is an ok game, I mean I probably would have liked it more if there weren't already other Castlevania clones that I reviewed in the past that offered a more enjoyable gameplay (maybe because they used a different engine?) and a longer adventure. It's true that these games mostly take inspiration from the more modern Castlevania titles (including dialogues and cutscenes), so they have a faster gameplay, more levels, enemies, challenges... as it is it looks like a romhack version of the original Castlevania, not a totally bad thing, but probably I expected a bit more.
In any case I think I covered all the good and bad things, and the final rating is that... it's ok!