Iratus: Lord of the Dead Early Access Preview

Being evil has always had its specific allure, yet the number of games that tackle playing as the bad guy pales in comparison to those where you’re the hero saving most, if not all, things. Iratus: Lord of the Dead, recently released on Steam Early Access, aims to contribute towards tipping the scales, even if just a little. Mixing Darkest Dungeon’s formula with a handful of RPG elements, the title puts players in the shoes of a vengeful necromancer with no love for the living and a utilitarian appreciation for his own unholy minions.

The combat in Iratus: Lord of the Dead will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Darkest Dungeon. A squad of four minions faces off against four opponents in 2D turn-based battles. Each minion has 5 abilities, some usable only from specific positions, alongside an ultimate that requires Wrath, a resource obtained passively by dealing and receiving damage. Proper positioning can determine whether you get to use a needed ability at the right moment or not, so displacing enemies and countering them displacing your units can sometimes end up being more important than dealing damage.

While physical and magical damage decrease vigor (health), stress damage and dealing critical hits affects the opponents’ sanity, being able to prompt them to run away, grant debuffs or kill them outright if their stress level is brought down to 0 and you keep pummeling them. While the shriek of a ghostly banshee terrifies men, your minions don’t have to worry about their mental states. After all, they’re piles of meat, bone, iron and various bodily fluids that you magically put together back in your lab. To that, Iratus adds the ability to use spells that the necromancer himself either learns, through investing talent points in one of four available talent trees, or obtains from limited-use artifacts which he can equip. These can range from passive effects that increase the chance of earning body parts, to spells that directly damage foes or weaken them over time.

While there are a fair few systems going into Iratus: Lord of the Dead’s combat, at the moment battles feel a bit sluggish and tedious. Reactivity is rarely required of players and, although each minion has its own set of diverse abilities, things start feeling too familiar a little too soon. It doesn’t help that, for the most part, enemies only stand out whenever they deal insanely lucky critical hits, essentially bringing your run to a halt for a bit or outright ending it when you run out of both minions and parts.

That’s because body parts earned by killing enemies represent the main way you expand and maintain an undead army. Different minions require different types and combinations of parts, which come in a limited amount. You start with six unlocked minion types, including bulky skeletons, a cannon-wielding zombie and a deadly archer. The latter quickly became my favorite, thanks to her ultimate which pierces through all enemies. Other minions can be unlocked by performing specific feats like killing a number of opponents, leveling minions up to specific points and so on. Currently, though, unlocking minions is done rather slowly, which means you’re likely to spend much more time than you’d like with the first six minion types.

The materials used in creating minions all have different rarities that ultimately affect the quality of your thralls, increasing their stats or granting them specific abilities. You can have up to four battle squads at one time, being able to switch between them prior to fights, which allows for experimenting with different minion compositions. While the loss of a leveled up minion that can also proc an ability to instantly obliterate opponents ends up being felt throughout the roster, I can’t quite say that I grew attached to my minions at all. Part of it is in the premise: instead of unlucky adventurers, you’re dealing with disposable animated piles of flesh and ectoplasm. The issue here is that given how it’s tough to form a connection to your minions, losing them in a battle largely remains a simple nuisance rather than an event that evokes an emotional response. Furthermore, while the animations themselves clearly show who or what is getting hit, Iratus’ graphical style feels a little too common, making me wish I could skip the attack animations after a while.

You access missions from an overhead map of the dungeons –three are in the game at the moment, two more being planned for launch– which clearly shows what awaits you on its branching paths, all the way to the area boss that guards the exit. Although once you set down a path movement becomes restricted, you can plan whether you want to push for extra items or corpse parts, or take a slightly smoother path around that leads to a quest with narrative decisions. The movement restriction does, however, make it so that losing a leveled squad can put you in a bit of a deadlock, as you throw level 1 minions at elite squads or bosses, which turned out to not be all that fun.

There’s also a base-building component that allows Iratus to repair his graveyard. Once repaired, each building comes with specific benefits, like healing interred troops or restoring Iratus’ mana, echoing Darkest Dungeon’s hamlet to an extent. This, alongside constantly adding talent points into your necromancer’s skill trees grants a very tangible sense of progress.

The added elements successfully manage to differentiate Iratus: Lord of the Dead from its sources of inspiration. It’s just a bit of a pity that its battles feel largely like uninspired copies of Darkest Dungeon’s at the moment. There are definitely kinks to work out, as Iratus: Lord of the Dead enters Early Access, and a fair bit of soul searching to better transmit the notion that you’re an evil necromancer. It’s a bit hard to do that when you’re dealing with humans that don’t exactly have a goody two-shoes vibe to themselves. And yet, if you’re looking for a turn-based battler that lets you assemble undead warriors from the bones of fallen foes but also doesn’t shun away from ruthlessly murdering them, keeping an eye on Iratus could prove to be worth it.
 

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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