Iratus

(No, I refuse to use "Monster Mash" for an epigraph here.)

Ah, the battle-cry of Daedalic Entertainment!

 

You can't spell "mediocrity" without "me di crit"

You'll hear it from me as from every reviewer: Iratus is just a shoddier rip-off of Darkest Dungeon with marginally higher production values (e.g. four frames per animation instead of two) and like seemingly every wax-wing-wonder that Daedalic publishes, you may not entirely hate it but you'll kick yourself if you paid more than a few bucks for it. (GoG ran it as a freebie last summer.) Still, modern games give entirely too few opportunities to play the villain, so you might want to give Iratus a glance, at the very least for its deliciously unabashed, unhedged and unhinged old-school evildoer bombast.

 

Screw it. The giant cow has gone unmilked for far too long!

You play as a (well-voiced!) villain of might and magic adding your own spells to your linear four's various abilities. In practical terms, Iratus' key conceit is that instead of hiring henchmen with all-purpose gold you must construct your werewolves, skeletons, wraiths, etc. from several kinds of body parts, which also serve as all-purpose crafting materials for potions or stat buffing gear. Shallowly entertaining, but given parts drop randomly every fight and can be re-condensed into each other, it doesn't take long for the system to start feeling like a gratuitously interposed timesink instead of a meaningful challenge. In fact, such timesinks abound:

- sacrificing minions to upgrade town buildings (might as well charge me the cost of a minion instead of making me make one)

- a bestiary unlocked randomly after fights, meaning never available when you really need the info

- gaining new monster types via achievement unlocks (again harming a first playthrough)

- forcing a tutorial before the campaign

- forcing multiple clicks here and there like the "select squad" prompt

- potion recipes unlocked via systematically permutating all components

- town upgrades again linked to achievement unlocks via their monster sacrifices

- diggers' souls used to upgrade buildings are painfully scarce at the start and useless late game (finished construction halfway through the campaign)

- no customizable templates for unit upgrades, see flexibility and rocket-tag issues below

All in all Iratus' pathetic desperation to force replay value instead of earning it masks a shallow imitation of DD's best features which could not stand on its own. I will admit it handles its three damage types (physical/magic/fear) decently enough to keep them relevant. Aside from that...

- the different dungeon types certainly have their own flair, but your linear advance through them removes the ability to juggle targets based on your available units as in DD; also, since you can enter rooms forward or laterally but never back, you mainly zig-zag to maximize the number of combats (and XP) instead of prioritizing objectives

- those available units themselves are less flexible, with no true alternate skill builds

- the linear four formation sees nowhere near the same depth as in DD, with fewer and less relevant movement options

- little or no in-combat healing or crowd control mainly just forces you to slot a skeleton/abomination in every group (for their protection ability) further limiting your options

- high damage/health ratios and lack of a "death's door" mechanic turn fights into rocket tag matches, especially as crit chance stacks higher and higher in late game, trivializing damage reduction. Even the aforementioned skeletons, abominations and bone golems, your tanks, can get 3-shotted in a single round.

 

That last part largely kills Iratus' long-term appeal. According to its core conceit, you're supposed to callously throw undead flesh at your enemies and replace it as you advance, using looted brains to instantly level your replacements to your current dungeon's difficulty. In practice, not only is this unfeasible at early levels but tedious at higher levels, as you'll need to re-slot every damn one of their skill points every damn time. Worse though, lucky crits/evades decide fights more than your tactics. To reiterate my complaint while playing Icewind Dale 2 (and D&D-inspired games in general):

"If the exact same player using the exact same characters in exactly the same way has even odds to triumph or be forced to reload, you start losing the function of players at all."

 

Worse yet, even your hopes of looting more body parts for crafting depend on randomly drawing bonuses at the end of fights, or looting %drop chance gear early in your campaign.

 

On the other hand... you can make teams of cannon-wielding zombies, friendly-firing liches and hyperaggressive werewolves... so Iratus was quaint enough for one leisurely playthrough, so long as you don't bother trying to iron man your way through random crits.

 

Let's put it another way: I'll be pre-ordering Darkest Dungeon 2 as soon as it becomes available. Iratus 2 can wait in the bargain bin for a few years.