Iratus: Lord of the Dead appeared on Steam's Early Access last summer - https://www.friv5online.com/. And now, nine months later, when all the jokes about " Darkest Dungeon the other way around," seemingly already joked, a full release of the game took place. The creation of the Russian studio Unfrozen came out even earlier than planned - which is quite unexpected, because lately transfers for a month or two have become commonplace. But, apparently, the developers felt that they brought Iratus: Lord of the Dead to mind. Now that you can complete the entire dungeon, it's time to evaluate how much the game has changed during your time in Early Access and is it worth it to spend dozens of hours in it.
In my last year’s preview, I already painted in detail what the Lord of the Dead gameplay is. In short, the player in the role of the necromancer Iratus, the commander of the undead units, needs to get out of the underground depths outward, to freedom. To do this, he has to go through several floors, levels. There were three in early access, and in the release version, catacombs and a cathedral were added to the mines, tunnels of the gnomes and barracks of mercenaries.
A map of each floor is randomly generated and has quite a few forks on which you can see in advance both enemies and random events, as well as chests with artifacts and other useful things. How to pump, killing all the enemies on the level and collecting all the treasures, alas, will not succeed: you can only move forward on the map.
Since you can’t return, you have to constantly choose the best way to exit, and then sacrificing either a meeting with cultivators who offer gifts, or a visit to the tomb, where a minion ready for service is waiting for us.
You can create (or rather, even need) minions manually: after all, our hero is a powerful necromancer. For this, fragments found on the battlefields are suitable: bones, skulls, weapons, ashes, ectoplasm, pieces of flesh and others like them. We are given a choice of 18 types of undead of all stripes. There are both familiar monsters like a skeleton, a banshee and a vampire, as well as much more exotic specimens: for example, a Lost Soul hung with masks, which does not disdain to strengthen opponents and beat on its own.
Ready creatures can be safely put into groups of four and send to fight. At the same time, one should not forget about caution, because the minion who fell in the battle dies once and for all (some items give a chance of rebirth, but I would not seriously count on them). The game is saved automatically in one slot for each passage, so when the resources and troops run out, the path through the dungeon will have to be started anew.
The turn -based combat system Iratus: Lord of the Dead immediately seems familiar to everyone who played in Darkest Dungeon: Each of the unit’s abilities is tied to the position it stands on. You can attack directly the health of the enemy or his mind. Loss of the latter can cause psychosis, flight from battle or even death from a broken heart. Well, or, conversely, inspiration - then the enemy will experience a surge of strength from fear.
All six unit abilities are immediately open - in this regard, you will not particularly experiment, all creativity begins during the assembly of the group. The combinations of minions are just darkness. To choose your ideal formula and finally make sure that it works is an incredible pleasure. In order for all the cards to work out, it is important to understand how the minions and their skills will fit together. Teamwork can be shown, for example, by the Bride of Iratus, who stands up and automatically shoots arrows from all position-changing enemies, and the Bounty Hunter, who can pull opponents to the first position with his hook.
If you wish, you can go through the dungeon and a detachment of one unit. The main thing is to equip it well. There is, however, a catch: when you find that ideal formula, trying something else at the later stages of the game is already scary, because there is a risk of losing everything.
Paragraphs in topics describing updates for the game often begin with the words “We received a lot of complaints about ...”, and it’s nice that the developers did not turn a blind eye to the claims of the players. For nine months, Unfrozen has really fixed a lot. So, merciless critical hits of enemies can now be neutralized with the help of blocks and amulets. When fleeing a battle, the surviving squad is saved (the “Retreat” button used to be, in fact, meaningless), and during the battles themselves, units can be moved one place forward and backward. Moreover, at the first two difficulty levels, save points appeared at the beginning of each floor, and now the game does not have to be started from the very beginning if the units and fragments from which they are created end.
The pumping of the undead has also changed: it has ceased to depend on randomly falling pieces that contain improvements in certain parameters of the minion. Now, after gaining a new level, the unit is given several points that you can independently scatter according to the characteristics: someone to strengthen a physical attack, someone - evasion and critical strike, and so on. The only thing is that the distribution of points cannot be canceled in any way, and it is counted right away, without the confirmation button.
In early access, minions could only be developed to the seventh level, but now, according to the developers, the maximum level is not limited. By the end of the game, I pumped my active squads to the thirtieth, and that was enough to defeat the final boss. Each minion still has two slots for special items, but now there are much more of these items, plus unique items for each type of undead have appeared. Alas, it is still impossible to pull an item out of the slot. But putting a new one on top of it, destroying the old one, is easy.
Artifacts of Iratus himself, fortunately, can still be shuffled as you like, adapting to the style of the game and enemies on the map. Excess equipment can now be converted into experience points of the necromancer, which is quite practical - many artifacts were not at all attracted to use in the passage, and they accumulated a dead load in the inventory.
The abilities of Iratus, which can be studied with increasing levels, were also balanced. For example, our villain was deprived of the opportunity to instantly kill an enemy unit. Apparently, the developers considered this spell too ultimatum - now it removes only 50% of its health. Iratus has a new combat parameter - spell power: the more it is, the lower the cost of applying magic and the more impressive the damage from it.
Alchemy began to work a little differently. An improved piece is no longer created from two pieces with worse quality. For a good fragment, you will need three components already (and it doesn’t matter which ones: a heart can be made even from bones, skulls and ashes) and a bit of luck. The better the source material, the higher the chance that something rare will come out. And between the battles with the help of processing pieces, you can restore the health of minions and mana Iratusu.
Another source of unit and mana stamina is the graveyard. The construction of a local base, where, among other things, you can train undead and find resources with artifacts, has also been simplified. If earlier during the construction of a building one minion was sacrificed, and the other then got up to “work” in the cell that appeared, now in almost all buildings the minion tightly “grows” into them at the construction stage and no one needs to be placed there anymore.
A team from St. Petersburg worked on Iratus , so from the game we should expect the appearance of Russian voice acting. Unfrozen didn’t start to trifle and added as many as three versions of Iratus’s arrogant speeches - two from Dmitry Puchkov , nicknamed Goblin (one of the versions with company phrases, but to be honest, I didn’t notice much difference) and one from Vladimir Antonik , a famous dubbing actor, giving her voice, for example, to Vesemiru in The Witcher 3 . But the minions, alas, did not get the voice acting - sometimes the units emit heartbreaking screams, but the rest of the time their cues are simply written over their heads.
Without any changes, even minor ones, there remained only the visual component of the game. AppearanceIratus: Lord of the Dead is still her weak point: with its outdated style and "default" interface, taken as if from browser games, the game looks faceless. Who knows, maybe the developers missed the zero and wanted to knock out a nostalgic tear from us: here it came in handy for a typical design for that time and Goblin as a voiceover. At the same time, I still think that Lord of the Dead does not look repulsive, but I dare to suggest that her style will still be scared away by some potential players.
Random events are a kind of lottery: you never know if you suddenly lose a unit or gain something of value. Then, looking at the plans of the cathedral, my minions received a bonus to the initiative until the end of the game. It is a pity, however, that the finale was already in a couple of fights.
In Iratus: Lord of the Dead rather curious fate. Initially, the game was positioned as an insanely hardcore turn-based RPG, where all units are consumables that can not be pumped and to which it makes no sense to get attached. But during the active work on the project, Unfrozen studio received a huge amount of feedback from players who did not want to suffer. As a result, the developers abandoned many of their early ideas and decided to make the game people wanted. Is it good? Do creators need to listen to the majority opinion and deviate from the original vision? The history of the creation of “Iratus” tells us that, probably, yes, since the public is happy. And the authors themselves admit that thanks to everyone who shared their ideas about the development of the game, it became better and better.
It is gratifying to see that Unfrozen does not plan to abandon its brainchild - already in September the Wrath of the Necromancer add-on should be released to Iratus , which will add new content to the game, including minions, bosses and ordinary enemies. He will also update the ending, which now leaves more questions than answers. It is clear that “Iratus” is from the category of those games in which the plot recedes far into the background, but after dozens of hours of gameplay, I would still like to see what is called a bullet in this story. Is a game worth spending those tens of hours in it? I can only give an affirmative answer. Despite all her roughness, she is seriously carried away, and if you fell in love with Darkest Dungeon at one time, but abandoned because of hardcore, then Iratus: Lord of the Dead has a chance to fill this hole in your soul. You can go through it at a normal level of complexity, preserving much more nerve cells.
Pros: addictive gameplay in which there is no grind; the very idea of acting as a necromancer villain who creates minions for himself; a huge number of combinations of minions; the authors' work on the bugs is worthy of respect.
Cons: faceless and outdated visual style; the game is still inferior to Darkest Dungeon in terms of variety.