Rise from your graves, come back from the dead, under the bidding of a long dead necromancer, for the sole purpose of laying waste to the fleshbags now roaming lands once terrorized by this manipulator of the dead. Today we will be looking at Undead Horde for the Nintendo Switch, with review code provided by 10tons.
In old times, a necromancer named Orcon (pronounced with a soft c for whatever reason), last of his kind, was imprisoned by the Paladins, under the leadership of one named Benevictor. Through a freak accident involving a clueless animal, Orson is freed from his imprisonment, rises up again and begins building his army to lay waste to the lands he once ruled, and unleash his vengeance on the still living Benevictor.
It’s a nice change of pace to see a story where you’re the villain for once, even if it’s not taking itself too seriously. Undead Horde isn’t trying to be deep at all with the plot, opting for a simplistic take on things, which is fine, since the gameplay matters more here. Speaking of which…
Undead Horde is a top-down action adventure game. More specifically, it is a top down beat-em-up with elements of real time strategy and RPGs. Like most action oriented 10tons games, it involves a twin stick control style where you’re free to move and rotate in any direction while attacking. Unlike its peers, namely JYDGE, Undead Horde goes in a different direction after the initial framework is established.
There are two central concepts to Undead Horde. First is Orcon himself, being the main character. Orcon’s offensive skillset consists of melee attacks and magic, assigned to the back shoulder buttons. Melee attacks are as simple as holding the right shoulder button and watching enemies die with whatever weapon you’re using. Enemies, destructible objects and quest rewards will drop tons of different weapons for you to experiment with, each having different effects, power, attacking speeds and other different attributes.
Magic spells are mainly cast with the left shoulder button. These are more powerful than standard melee attacks, but are dependent on mana, represented by the blue meter next to your health. The type of attack and/or effect changes depending on what staff you have equipped, so experiment when you can. Related to magic are rings, assigned to the left and right d-pad buttons. These spells are of the supportive type for your minions, and depending on the ring equipped, can provide effects such as damage mitigation, added damage, elemental damage, among others. Strategic use of magic can and will turn the tide of battle.
The second central concept in the game is, unsurprisingly, necromancy, controlled by the front shoulder buttons. When you kill enemies, you may notice a yellow skull icon over their corpse, which indicates that they can be revived by holding the front right shoulder button and turned into undead soldiers. These soldiers can then be commanded with the actions assigned to the front left shoulder button, which are follow and attack. In follow mode, you gain the ability to move faster and ease any backtracking, as well as make a daring escape when things go south. In attack mode, undead soldiers will attack anything in front of the direction you’re facing, represented by the arrow that appears when attack mode is enabled. They don’t stop until they’re dead or the enemy is dead. Furthermore, you have a cap as to the amount of undead you can bring with you, represented by the outer circle surrounding your health and mana. This is what gives Undead Horde those RTS elements, alongside the fact that you can pick and choose any enemy you’ve defeated enough of to summon back at base. You can’t take on the collective horde of the living alone, so having the undead as cannon fodder gives you freedom to do anything else, be it wear down a separate enemy, destroying a structure, or breaking things to replenish mana. The undead also provide general cover for when you need to summon more undead mid-battle, since getting hit during the necromancy animation will reset the timer and put you at a disadvantage.
All of these attributes are improved upon levelling up. When you do, you’re given a choice of three cards, each of which boosts a particular stat or stats more by comparison. Neither of them is the wrong choice to make, though it’s important to keep everything as balanced as possible.
Game progression has elements borrowed from open world, RPG and Metroidvania type games. An easy, not to mention substantial comparison to make is with the PlayStation 1 classic known as MediEvil, since the game structure is extremely similar. An open-ish world divided into levels, many of which have branching paths, multiple objectives to clear for progression and lots of backtracking. The comparisons can stretch as far as the plot, but that’s a different topic, and it’s where the similarities end. Unlike Sir Daniel Fortesque, who can take on pretty much everything alone, Orcon is forced to rely on constant necromancy to even the odds against his more numerous enemies. Facing one enemy alone is doable; facing a small faction of enemies alone will quickly lead to a fast retreat or death. Thankfully, progression in general is made to be as painless as possible. Restocking on minions and health is as simple as warping back to your home base from one of the many nodes scattered across the world, and you can be back at any given location within a minute to try again. And if the stuff you’re acquiring from enemies doesn’t cut it for killing, look no further than the shops back at base, which are unlocked as you rescue more allies. These stock the best of the best in equipment as long as you invest in levelling them up, so you likely won’t be struggling with lower tier equipment for long.
As you can probably tell from the world map, Undead Horde is a rather long journey. Individual areas can take quite a bit of time themselves, and there might be necessary grinding to even the odds level-wise against enemies further down the road. The pacing is fast enough that it never really becomes an issue, but it can get monotonous when you have to go back and forth to restock on minions and health to get past one section. Still, you’re getting your money’s worth with the journey. Undead Horde’s gameplay is similar enough to other 10tons action games to be familiar, but distinct enough to be unique for what it is.
This is the part where I humorously say that the promotional art is misleading. You’re shown this dark, gritty necromancer commandeering spooky scary skeletons that send shivers down your spine, but in reality the game’s art style has that low poly, blocky retro feel, which amongst games we’ve reviewed before is most comparable to Morphite.
That’s not to say the visual style is lacking, though. They clearly put in the effort to make areas look distinct, enemies and creatures look distinguishable, and none of it looks dull. There’s a healthy mix of color and monotone when appropriate, such as the atmosphere change when you’ve conquered an area completely or exploring some dark catacombs. The music is fitting with the style as well. Instead of bombastic fantasy tunes you’d expect from the genre, the music is instead calm and subdued, comparable to Minecraft or, again, MediEvil.
A tradeoff from the simplistic visual style is that the game runs without any hitches at all, at a consistent framerate of 60 fps. There are moments when you’re dashing with many units behind that the game may lag a tiny bit (which is an effect not easily visible on YouTube videos), but those moments are very brief and borderline inconsequential. The game overall performs excellently.
Among it’s ilk, Undead Horde is a rather unique title in the 10tons library. It’s definitely one of the better ones on account of the gameplay style provided. I personally enjoy JYDGE more by comparison, but that in no way makes Undead Horde any less good, and you can get a lot of game out of it. And with all that said…oh yeah, no more of those star ratings. They were pretty limiting, and in hindsight some of them are pretty unrepresentative of the feelings I’d have with a game, let alone on a 0-5 scale. But enough about that. I recommend Undead Horde if you’re looking for a different kind of action game, one that isn’t very demanding and easy to pick up and play.
