An enjoyable but slightly unbalanced hack-and-slash
Spirit Mancer is the latest hack-and-slash Indie, packed with fun combat, deck-building skills and plenty of tough and imaginative bosses along the way. The story is well written for the most part, with little pockets of humour and cutscenes that work well to break up the action. It’s certainly not perfect, and there are a few issues with the core gameplay, but for the most part, Spirit Mancer is a rip-roaring good time and well worth the 6-15 hours you’ll get out of this one, depending on how well you do with the fighting!
The story is pretty straightforward and revolves around a chosen one (ie. you) accidentally teleporting into the demon’s realm. The pig inhabitants there are convinced that you’re going to slay the Demon Queen and harmonize the world. In reality, you just need to find the blasted mystical key to return to your own world.
However, there are some twists and turns along the way, with a McGuffin, some plot twists and a betrayal all playing into the main storyline. It’s quite straightforward stuff and honestly, the story works better than it should. The game has a way of bolstering out your team and giving a sense of progression by giving the bosses you encounter little backstories or reasons for thwarting you, which makes these encounters that much more meaningful. I won’t go into detail here but the boss fights are far and away the best part of this game, drawing on a broad range of ideas to make for some pretty memorable and tough boss sequences.
The main gameplay is your typical hack-and-slash meat, sandwiched between two predominant forms of combat – melee and ranged. I’ll go into this in more detail shortly but the level design on the whole is pretty good. There’s a nice variety of levels that you blast across, with all the usual biomes like ice worlds and fiery volcanoes, contrasting against desert trains and a spooky castle. There’s nothing particularly unique that you won’t have seen in other games, but the designs are unique enough that you never feel like the devs have re-used assets to speed up the design process, which is nice.
The levels are all on 2D plains and play out similarly to titles like Sonic and Mega Man. There are slight deviating paths which usually lead to more enemies or chests to open. There aren’t any collectibles per-se, but there are secret rooms which need special keys to open, and resources to gain. It’s a nice way of incentivizing exploration but personally, the game would have a lot more replayability value if it did include collectibles or some form of special resource (like rare cards not found anywhere else) to really incentivize players to maximize their time in these areas.
The bulk of what you do here though is not exploration, and although levels do have light puzzles and platforming sections, most of the time you’ll be engaging in combat. As mentioned earlier, this is broken down into melee and ranged. However, there’s also a card-spawning system here (like Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon) where monsters come and fight for you after summoning them from cards.
Enemies themselves have the standard HP counter, but then also a stagger-esque system with shields that can be broken down to stun enemies. Shields come in three colours to distinguish what sort of attacks you should be using against them. Green is for melee, Blue for ranged/projectiles and purple for cards. Using these attacks not only staggers enemies faster, they also do a bit more damage too so it is worth switching up your approach.
Whittling down these bars and either collecting their spirit or killing them outright garners gems or money, which feeds into a larger resource pool. Each of the enemies you fight will be quite straightforward in their attack patterns, with aerial monsters, grounded troops and (later on) elemental fiends to try and tackle.
There’s a good amount of variety with these enemies, although the risk/reward system is not particularly well balanced. Some of the enemies can be incredibly tricky to take out, especially fiery cats late on and genies that constantly blast projectiles. Given the resources you gain from defeating enemies, it’s actually more economically viable to skip combat outright in the later levels and instead hunt for treasure chests, which hold far better prizes – and higher amounts of resource.
It feels like a bit of an overlook from the devs, because if I could gain 100+ resources from opening a chest and 10+ for defeating each tough enemy, obviously most would go for the former. Of course, there’s the option of collecting those enemies in card form, but once you’ve gained a few strong ones and levelled them up, the deck-building is not quite as game-changing as it otherwise could be. You’ll basically be adding your strongest monsters and a healing cup or two. There’s no strategic planning around certain monsters using resources or damaging you when you summon it for example, so there’s not much to really think about here.
The levels are split across different stages, and at the end of each, there will be a boss fight. This, as mentioned earlier, is where Spirit Mancer shines. Honestly, I looked forward to fighting the bosses in every world and they really elevated the overall experience with this. And damn are they tough!
Some of them require a lot of precision and late on, the game forces you to master the use of dodge-rolling in order to survive some of the attacks. My main gripe though comes from unskippable cuteness which are unfortunately prevalent here mid-fight for those bosses that either switch up their attack patterns or transform into more monstrous forms. Given you’re likely to die here more than at any other part of the game, it’s definitely something to consider.
Outside of main missions, your “Village” becomes a one-stop shop for all things Spirit Mancer. In between missions, you can upgrade skills and cards (using the collected aforementioned resources), buy weapons and even go fishing. There is a loose resource collecting gig here too, which can be used to craft new cards, while you can also upgrade your cards to stronger forms as well.
The cards themselves are generally just the monsters you collect along the way, but being able to upgrade them or add in healing cups (which heal HP for a set period of time) can be really useful during tricky moments in fights. However, you can also spam these cards as well and add in loads of monsters at a time during fights which completely sways the difficulty in your favour. On one boss fight, I went from 100% to 50% health just by conjuring 6 cards at once while the guy was stunned. It doesn’t happen often, granted, but this system can definitely be exploited to make Spirit Mancer a lot easier.
There’s also a resource-exploit with Spirit Mancer’s Adventure Guild minigame. Here, you can recruit villagers to send off on quests to collect resources for you. Time passes after every mission – regardless of how long or short they take – allowing you to collect the plundered resources when you return to the village after completing them. You do have to be successful though (Yes, I did try intentionally failing and it didn’t work) but given there are a smattering of side quests here that can take between 1-10 minutes tops, saving all of these and blasting them through all back to back toward the end of the game, sending villagers out on raids in between each one, can very quickly build up your resources and allow you to level up your character fast.
These sort of balancing issues are really the one deterrent with Spirit Mancer, as there are quite a few exploits you can take advantage of to make the game easier. I’m sure there are more than the ones listed above and I’m not sure if that was the intent from the devs, but I’m sure they’re not banking of most players skipping large parts of combat just to grab chests and blast their way to bosses. Alas, it’s actually the more effective way of playing this one, unless you want to “collect ’em all” and grab every card.
Visually, the game looks great and uses its pixel-art to solid effect. The cutscenes are rendered in largely the same way, while there’s a quirky undercurrent of humour that keeps things feeling light and breezy. Character models are incredibly expressive and detailed, given the pixelated textures, and each of the characters you encounter are very imaginative and distinct in their appearance.
This translates across to the musical score too, which plays into that old-school feel of SNES titles with a MIDI soundtrack. There’s only really a few tracks to draw on, which is a bit of a shame, but the main motif is repeated to good effect in different areas. Hearing the main theme slowed down and given a slight echo inside icy caves for example, is a really nice touch.
The game has a bit of replayability, especially if you want to grab all the achievements, but once you’ve played through every level, there’s not a whole lot of reason to dive back in again. The one exception to this is perhaps the inclusion of couch co-op, which is definitely a bonus. Again, this is something that makes the game that much easier, especially if you have someone else to help you out during those tough boss fights.
Given a few of the bosses have multiple targets to juggle between, with co-op, these fights take half the amount of time they normally would. However, it’s a lot of fun to blast through this with someone else so it’s quite a good trade all things considered!
Spirit Mancer is definitely a blast to play though but it’s not without its problems. The game is undoubtedly a bit unbalanced given how easily the mechanics can be exploited, while rewards for combat feel disappointingly sparse compared to searching for chests and using the Adventure Guild.
Balancing issues aside, if you’re after a simple, challenging and enjoyable hack’n’slash, Spirit Mancer is a lot of fun and well worth your time.
Spirit Mancer releases on Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC on 22nd November 2024!
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