Dungeon Of Nazarick

My brother came across Dungeon of Nazarick by accident while looking for another game I mentioned to him.  The game is named after a place from the anime Overlord which I am slightly familiar with.  I gave the game a try and found out very quickly I wasn't very good at it.  My brother took over for me and he did complete the game as I watched and observed.  By the end we did not have a very positive view of the game.

 

This is a platformer game that is very much like the game Ghost N Goblins and has you playing as an adventure who is raiding Nazarick (this is a place in the anime).  As you start each stage you fight off random enemies that spawn around you all while jumping around avoiding pitfalls and other hazards.  Eventually you get to a boss  which represents one of the characters from the anime which requires you to memorizing a pattern to beat.  Just like Ghost N Goblins, if you get hit once you loose your armor and  a second time will kill you. This game does a decent job of emulating the same gameplay as Ghost N Goblins which is why it keeps getting referenced in this review, it's basically the same game.

 

The biggest issue with this game is the boss fights and the unevenness of the difficulty.  Some boss battles were a joke and only took two or three tries to figure out while others took almost thirty tries to get down.  The difficulty wasn't due to the boss mechanics themselves but the randomness of how the boss attacked.  This randomness made coming up with a winning strategy almost pointless since what worked in one battle might not work the next time around.  While randomness can be a good thing, in this case it made the game extremely frustrating and much harder than it needed to be.

 

This is an average looking game and looks like it was based on a NES game.  The stages and characters have some level of detail but nothing extraordinary.  The game did do a good job of trying to recreate most of the major characters from the anime as bosses.  Music and sound effects are there and are passable.   Again, if this game came out on the NES back in the late eighties I wouldn't have complained about the graphics and sounds then and I won't do that now.

 

This game ended up not being that much fun.  While it has the Ghost N Goblins feel to its design and playstyle, the boss difficulty really turned this game off for the two of us.  It took us just over two hours to beat the game and the game says we died 230 times.  Even with the re-spawn points after you die, unlimited continues and the occasional interesting platforming pieces, the boss difficulty was getting to the point of frustrating which is what did this game in for us.  If you are someone who likes challenging games you might like this one, everyone else should skip this game.