RPGWatch Feature - Iratus: Lord of the Dead Review

Iratus: Lord of the Dead is a reversed dungeon crawler. Instead of playing a group of heroes who travel through a dungeon to face some ancient evil, you play Iratus, who is a necromancer that has been unintentionally freed from his tomb by foolish grave robbers. The necromancer sends his minions to conquer a series of catacombs in order to make it to the surface, where he can realize his dream of extinguishing all life. As a traditional villain, Iratus leaves most of the dirty work to his minions, whom he supports from a safe distance with his magic. The necromancer must also manage a number of resources, so he can replace dead minions, bolster existing ones, and increase his own powers. Anyone who has played or seen Darkest Dungeon will see its influence on Iratus: Lord of the Dead. Iratus must escape his confinement and defeat all the mortal enemies who face him. Each battle is potentially dangerous, and minions are only to a certain degree expendable. Battles are from the side view, and undead minions have different powers which can be executed dependent on where they stand in the battle formation. The game also has some rogue-light qualities, such as having only one save and a somewhat random dungeon floor layout. But Iratus: Lord of the Dead is in many ways its own game, for better or worse.

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henriquejr said:

Thank you for another great review, Forgottenlor! This one is on my wishlist

I'd like to ask you if you have the Iratus Supporter Pack DLC and if you used the minion that comes in it (The Infested). If so, is it worth to buy it?

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fadedc said:

My main issue with the game when I first bought it was how incredibly easy and trivial it was. All of the challenging difficulty levels were locked out when you started and you had to win the entire game before you could try a harder mode where the enemies might actually put up a fight. This might have been ok if the game was short, but it's not, you'd have to slog through hours of hours of trivial fights before unlocking the ability to reset the game and play it a higher difficulty level where (maybe) it would be harder. It was a horrible decision for any game like that, but especially weird for a game that claimed to be a a hard game that you should expect to lose. Did they ever fix that?

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forgottenlor said:

The first 2 difficulties easy and normal (cakewalk and more pain) can be played from the get go, though you aren't given the choice to switch to more pain until you have played through about an hour (the tutorial). I also did not find the battles all that difficult for the most part, and finished the game without losing too many minions. Though I did just scrape through a couple of battles in the 3rd and 5th dungeon levels. It certainly didn't seem as difficult as Darkest Dungeons, which took me about 15 hours to figure out how to play "right." So if you are looking for punishing difficulty, this probably isn't the best game.

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fadedc said:

Yeah that's the same as it was when I played when it first came out.

I don't necessarily need punishing difficulty, but I wanted to feel like there was some challenge. The game was definitely promoting itself as being a harder game like Darkest Dungeon, so it was so strange that they would make it so easy and lock away the harder levels.

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