Deliver Beatdowns to the beat with Crypt Of The Necrodancer!

Two genres that are apparently impossible to merge, Rhythm Game and Dungeon Crawler, get fused in a unique and fantastic videogame, let's see how well it delivers.

Graphics

Graphics are made in a very pleasing pixel-art, but doesn't turn down some very nice effects that don't hinder the game experience in any way, the zones are well differenciated so to make the player more eager to continue playing. Cutscenes use some kind of semi-animated images, still made with pixel-art, that are really nice.

Setup and Performance

Installing the game from steam is completely painless, but a mistake in the Italian translation made the audio/video calibration impossible to complete. After checking the discussions page for the issue and changing the game language to English, the calibration was successfully completed in about 2 minutes.

The game has no slowdowns, loading the zones is almost instant, but this has a setback: the loading at the beginning of the game, just after opening the executable.

The initial loading is definitely too slow, and it doesn't seem that the loading screen has any kind of MultiThreading coded into it, so the game will look like frozen for a good couple of minutes, if it wasn't for the background music still working properly (not looping).

Sounds

The sound effects are good and spot-on, but the strength of Crypt of the Necrodancer is the music.

Amazing.

Danny Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac) hits the mark again with tracks that involve you right off the bat, from the first level. Songs that are not only complementary to the gameplay but the gameplay itself focuses on those songs.

Gameplay

The gameplay is the one of a normal dungeon crawler with randomly generated zones, with a limitation: you can move only when the music beats, that is highlighted by the beating heart in the lower side of the screen. Gameplay is simple to understand but hard to master, and many times you'll end up calling down some heavenly entities when a "miss" will get you killed.

Everything is extremely involving and you'll find yourself spending hours on the game without even realizing.

Conclusion

If you like rhythm games, or you want a challenge and you like involving music tracks that you would listen to even out of the game; Crypt of the Necrodancer is the game for you.

The final judgement, as usual, goes from 0 (kill it with fire) to 100 (owning this game should be a human right).

I think a fair score could be: 91/100

Thank you everybody again for reading, and see you on the next post!

Penaz.

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