David Sanders
David SandersLongtime readers may recall that I wrote an Early Access preview of Unfrozen and Daedalic Entertainment’s joint effort, Iratus: Lord of the Dead, quite a while back. I also made a video on its Early Access version shortly after we launched our YouTube channel last year. Well, the game has been officially released and out of Early Access for quite some time as of this article’s publication.
Heck, it has even been granted a fully-fledged piece of DLC during the time that has passed since I wrote that original article and recorded that video. In light of that, I’d like to showcase Iratus again now that everything it has to offer is fully playable. Let me start by briefly discussing the game’s plot.
Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead, is the most powerful necromancer the in-game world has ever known. In the game’s introductory cutscene, Iratus learns the hard way that even a sorcerer as powerful as himself isn’t immune to death… or in his case, being temporarily incapacitated.
After all, to paraphrase Iratus himself, dying means little more than boredom to someone who has mastered the forces of death and undeath. After being felled at essentially the battle that constituted humanity’s last stand against the undead, Iratus had an entire millennium to ponder his failure, devise improved strategies, and plot his revenge against the living.
The necromancer is suddenly awoken by humans of some description. It doesn’t quite seem clear in the opening cutscene whether these humans were cultists who wished to devote themselves to Iratus, or just some unfortunate workmen who happened across the necromancer’s tomb and inadvertently freed him.
Either way, once Iratus awakens, it’s your job to control him and his minions as he regains his strength. Over time, he will develop the capability to achieve his ultimate goal of purging the world of all life. How do you go about that, exactly? Well, that question leads me nicely to discussing this title’s actual gameplay.
Before I can do that, though, I should include something of a disclaimer. I’m going to almost instinctively compare Iratus: Lord of the Dead to another game, specifically Red Hook Studios’ Darkest Dungeon, fairly frequently throughout this review. The sole reason for that is the fact that the games are quite similar to one another in many ways. I want to emphasize, however, that I absolutely don’t mean to say that Iratus simply rides Darkest Dungeon’s coat-tails all the way to fame and prominence.
Rather, I believe that Iratus: Lord of the Dead easily deserves your time based on what it has to offer. It’s just that comparing the game to Darkest Dungeon is the easiest way for me to illustrate my points for those of you who have played Darkest Dungeon. Anyhow, let’s move on to discussing Lord of the Dead’s gameplay, shall we?
I say we should get the most obvious comparison between Iratus and Darkest Dungeon out of the way first. PC Gamer has (in the past) referred to Iratus as “like Darkest Dungeon, except you’re the bad guy.” Based on what I’ve experienced of both games in question, I’d say that comparison is spot on. For example, in Darkest Dungeon, you have to manage the stress levels of your mercenaries as they go about their grim task of eradicating the unspeakable evils that surround your ancestral home.
If your mercenaries are too overwhelmed by stress, they can lose their mental faculties in a hurry, or even die from a stress-induced heart attack if their stress meter fills completely. In contrast, in Iratus, the undead have nothing to stress about. Instead, you’re the one who can inflict damage to your enemies‘ stress levels and cause their mental states to deteriorate. After all, Iratus and his minions are quite similar to those aforementioned unspeakable evils plaguing the land of Darkest Dungeon.
Since Iratus’ necromancy-related abilities are rather weak at first due to his millennium spent entombed, you start out your first run of the game with an equally underwhelming group of minions. Even so, these creations of yours should be just about powerful enough to slay the first several groups of enemies you run into. After each victory in battle, you and your minions automatically harvest parts from your fallen foes. These parts can be used to craft new soldiers of various types each time you return to Iratus’ lair between instances of fisticuffs.
As you might imagine, the parts necessary to craft new minions depends on the variety of the fiend you wish to assemble. For example, you need a skull, a set of bones, a weapon, and a set of armor to craft a standard skeleton. The “recipes” for each craftable minion vary widely. That’s entirely because there’s a fairly significant repertoire of creations you can unlock as you conquer increasing swaths of the living and meet certain challenges the game places before you.
As you progress through what I call “the five dungeons” which constitute the arenas that your battles take place in, you’ll occasionally harvest higher-quality parts. These can be used to craft stronger minions. You can also swap out and upgrade lower-quality parts in active minions you’ve already crafted in order to do such things as give those minions bonus stat points.
These stat points can be spent for various purposes such as increasing a minion’s maximum health pool, which is referred to in-game as “vigor,” or their resistances to physical and magical damage. Stat points differ from ability points, which essentially do exactly what they say on the tin. Each of your minions possesses six abilities which can be altered and upgraded when they gain enough experience to reach specific higher levels. One gameplay aspect that goes hand-in-hand with concepts like minion stat points and ability points is the act of periodically harvesting usable brains from fallen enemies.
Brains serve to immediately increase a minion’s level based on the level of the brain. To elaborate, suppose you have a level one skeleton in one of your battle groups, and you acquire a level five brain from a battle. Once you equip that level one skeleton with that specific brain, the skeleton will instantly be elevated to level five and get all the perks, like bonus stat and ability points, which come with that higher level.
One of the few gripes I have with this game concerns its boss fights, which you encounter each time you reach the end of a dungeon. Granted, I’ve admittedly only defeated two of the game’s bosses at the time of this review’s publication. Even so, the concepts of both battles appeared to be exactly the same. That may sound disheartening, but I’m afraid that’s only part of the bone I have to pick with the game’s boss fights as a whole, if you’ll pardon the pun.
As I just mentioned, it certainly seems like both bosses I’ve conquered at the time of writing share the same general concepts and mechanics. The bosses themselves are basically just typical enemies with abnormally large amounts of health and the ability to summon underlings to fight for them. These cronies seem to serve only as a distraction which usually hinders your ability to focus your minions’ attacks on the boss, or perhaps prevents you from doing so entirely until you kill one of them to create an opening.
To provide a more specific example, the second boss I’ve fought has mechanical pylons instead of human enemies at his disposal. The boss in question can give himself several charges of Block and Ward, and has the ability to frequently repair and replace his pylons. What this means for you is that the only way to meaningfully damage this boss is to destroy his constructs one at a time. Doing so will cause damage to the boss via the resulting explosions.
As you might imagine, I’ve found that this boss fight and its predecessor quickly become tedious due to these battle mechanics. I would go so far as to suggest that perhaps Iratus took a bit too much inspiration from Darkest Dungeon in this particular department, as both games contain boss fights that employ this fairly annoying mechanism.
At this point, I’d like to return to a concept I mentioned a moment ago, namely that of the Block and Ward systems. Blocks and Wards are buffs that can be granted to enemies and your minions alike through various means. These buffs have the capability to turn the tide of a battle on their own if they’re used strategically.
Blocks do what they say on the tin, essentially. They absorb any incoming physical attacks and cancel out any debuffs such attacks may inflict. Wards have the same effect on incoming magic-based attacks. When a Block or Ward absorbs an attack, a charge of whichever of them was used is lost. As an example, each Lich minion you create starts each battle with two charges of Ward at its disposal by default.
Of course, if a minion or enemy has no remaining charges of Block or Ward, they’re fully susceptible to any incoming physical and magical damage unless their resistances to these distinct damage types allow them to dampen or outright ignore the attack. The concept of damage leads me to another complaint I have regarding Lord of the Dead. In Darkest Dungeon, the health of all your mercenaries, even the ones who aren’t in your current battle group, is fully restored once you return to the central hub town after a mission. This isn’t the case with your creations in Iratus.
Rather, your soldiers remain wounded after each battle unless you manually take action to restore their Vigor. You can typically do this in one of two primary ways, but neither is without its drawbacks. The first method is what I consider to be the most frustrating and demanding way to heal your creations between fights. You can send damaged minions to the Mortuary, which is present within the graveyard that contains Iratus’ lair.
Unlike most of the other buildings present in the graveyard, you start with the Mortuary unlocked. That means you can order at least one minion to stay there as soon as the need arises. However, as I mentioned a moment ago, there are several caveats to using the Mortuary to heal your undead soldiers while they’re out of combat. Firstly, you can only have a maximum of four minions stationed there at a time.
Secondly, the Mortuary only restores Vigor to your minions after each successful battle; even then, it only restores 75% of occupying troops’ Vigor rather than healing them fully. This means if your strongest minions are too badly damaged for the 75% restoration to truly be useful, or if you lose a battle at an inopportune time, your best battle squad will likely be out of commission for potentially far longer than you’d prefer.
What I consider to be more important (and irritating) than all of that, is the fact that in order to unlock the Mortuary’s maximum capacity you’ll need to sacrifice minions of various types to open up the building further. In turn, you’ll have to meet certain requirements in order to unlock the necessary minions in the first place before you can craft and subsequently sacrifice them. In summary, the Mortuary definitely has its uses, but it comes with far too many strings attached in my opinion.
That brings me to the secondary way you can restore the Vigor of your undead legions, namely alchemy. Iratus can perform four different types of alchemy, all of which have various effects. The actual names of the types of alchemy at your disposal are Calcination, Distillation, Extraction, and Transmutation.
Transmutation allows you to utilize three minion-creation parts of the same type (say, three sets of bones, for instance) in order to make one higher-quality part. Your odds of getting increasingly high-quality parts are based on Iratus’ level and the quality of the original parts you use for this purpose. Extraction allows you to use three parts of different types to make a higher-quality part of a random type. Calcination allows you to turn parts into Mana, which Iratus can spend to cast spells during combat.
Most relevant to what I was just discussing, though, is Distillation. This is the type of alchemy that allows you to destroy any minion parts you choose in order to restore a smaller percentage of Vigor to your entire active army. Although the healing provided by alchemy is less significant than that provided by the Mortuary, I think this route is simpler if you need to patch up several minions at once.
That’s especially true if you have a surplus of unneeded minion components. I would say healing via alchemy also has fewer drawbacks and stipulations compared to healing via the Mortuary. This method of revitalizing your undead legions may not be quite as appealing at the beginning of a run, primarily because you may find yourself short on spare parts. However, I suspect that you’ll likely be swimming in extra ingredients after a few victories on the battlefield.
Now, I’ve explained quite a few mechanics present within Iratus: Lord of the Dead so far. I’ve discussed some of the few complaints I have about its gameplay. Yet, I still feel that I’ve missed an important component of this article because I’ve scarcely said anything about what I actually like about the game. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to close out this review by gushing about a few things I really do quite enjoy when it comes to this particular title.
To put it bluntly, folks, the primary reason I like Lord of the Dead as much as I do is because it feels quite a bit like Darkest Dungeon with a different coat of paint. That may sound like a condemnation of either Iratus or Darkest Dungeon, but it most certainly isn’t. I simply cannot stress that enough. I concede that Iratus does appear to have taken significant inspiration from the Darkest Dungeon formula. I think that would be readily apparent to anyone who has played both of these games.
However, I believe Iratus builds quite a bit upon the foundations it borrows from Red Hook’s bleak title and changes around its gameplay more than enough to avoid being dismissed as a simple “Darkest Dungeon clone.” For example, consider what I call the “role-reversal” between the two games in question when it comes to the stress mechanic.
I can’t speak for you, of course, but it feels especially satisfying to me when my minions’ stress-based attacks cause an enemy’s mental fortitude to erode quickly enough that they flee from battle in terror before me. That feeling is a massive difference from the sense of impending dread you get when one of your mercenaries in Darkest Dungeon is about to either undergo a test of their resolve due to stress, or even die from it. I recognize that many people who’ve played Darkest Dungeon see that dread as a challenge and enjoy it all the more because of that; I’m just simply not one of those people.
If you’ve read my aforementioned review of Darkest Dungeon and/or watched my video on it, you’ll know that I absolutely adore the game’s narrator. I say that with such confidence because of the way he instills both hope and fear in me as my mercenaries and I go about our grim task and play the metaphorical hands we’ve been dealt.
Similarly, in the case of Lord of the Dead, Iratus himself takes the role of narrator. As you might imagine, I enjoy his presence in that capacity in equal measure. Iratus has quite a dark sense of humor as he watches over and, occasionally participates in, his minions’ conquest of the lands of the living. I’d say that’s to be expected from a master of necromancy who’s just awoken from a millennium entombed, during which time he presumably had nothing to do but come up with snappy one-liners.
On a final note, I just realized I’ve said the word “minion” on more occasions throughout this review than I thought I would throughout my entire life. To that end, I’m going to conclude this article before I end up getting cast in the next Despicable Me film. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to tackle this title’s aforementioned Wrath of the Necromancer DLC!
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🔥1.1 KIratus: Lord of the Dead
$29.99 USD
Pros
- Gameplay will likely make Darkest Dungeon fans feel right at home
- Large variety of craftable soldiers
- Narration has a familiar, dark sense of humor
Cons
- Could easily be written off as a "Darkest Dungeon clone"
- Tedious boss fights
- Certain gameplay mechanics could be explained better
