Better with Friends

Once, it was expected to have a friend or sibling that you could force to play certain games together.  Now it is just generally accepted that one might never meet the people that they digitally meet.  Warlocks 2: God Slayers, on the other hand, does not stray away from the old formula of couch co-op, although it might quickly become the question if they stayed true to that a little too much.

The graphics and style in the game are something that could have been from a launch PlayStation 1 2D sprite title.  Smooth and flowing, bright and lively, everything is rather expressive in the way that they move and it is easy to pick the character out from the background themselves.  The game also goes the extra distance to put the effort and detail into the sprites that is missing from most games that go for the 16-bit look.  The Warlocks are detailed and full.

From the start the player is asked to select one of five very different characters.  No instructions are given on how they differ from one another, and there isn’t a great chance to stop until the first level is over.  So whatever choice is made is almost finalized for 10-15 minutes, even if they feel cumbersome and odd.  This includes skipping dialog as well.  It goes faster on repeated play through, but even a simple tooltip would help fix most of this.

The other major issue is the gameplay balance.  Single player mode suffers as it seems simply designed from the ground up to be about play with others.  If no one else is present, the same amount of content remains, leaving the same amount of enemies, doing the same amount of damage to one person.  The solution to this is to either get familiar with the game mechanics very quickly, or grind.  Most players who manage to stick with it will end up between a combination of the two of them, but that is if they stick with it– which is a tall order.

Warlocks 2 isn’t a bad game at all.  It does humor passingly well, which is hard for a video game.  The graphics are fun and the core mechanics are solid.  The only problem is that it almost feels like no one outside of the core group of people who made the game ever really play tested it, leaving massive gaps in what should be there.  These aren’t problems that can’t be easily address, but they are also problems that are there right now and make the game hard to recommend unless you are playing through with a good friend or three.