Spirit Mancer review

Often when recommending a game to a buddy the easiest way to do so is to compare it to games you know they like. There are so many Deck Builders that can easily be described as very similar to Slay the Spire for example, and even genre names like Metroidvania and Soulslike are essentially just a way of explaining that a game is “sort of like those ones”. Well when I heard that Spirit Mancer was a 2D hack and slash game inspired by Mega Man and Pokémon I was immediately interested, but it also meant I went in with pretty high expectations.

The hero of this piece is Sebastian, a cocky demon hunter who’s overconfidence on a mission results in him and his allies being dragged into another world. Greeted by pig people, Sebastian is identified as the hero of legend and given a new snazzy demon hand to help save the world from the demon queen. With some flashy cutscenes and decent writing it’s a nice overarching plot to follow between levels.

The bulk of the action in Spirit Mancer though takes place on 2D action stages, where you’ll do a bit of light platforming and a lot of hectic combat. Sebastian starts the game with the close range demon sword and a gun, as well as the ability to dodge roll around to avoid damage. You’ll soon get used to using this arsenal to take down all the demon enemies the world throws at you, especially once you start taking advantage of weak points.

Each enemy you fight has a weakness or two you’ll need to exploit to break their guard, consisting of either melee, gun, or card attacks (more on this later). Not only will using the weaknesses deal more damage to a foe, but once you break them successfully you can trap them in a card and use their power against other enemies. These are one time use only, but it’s so easy to grab more cards for your little deck that this isn’t too much of a bother.

The enemy card attacks come in all shapes and sizes, with some providing occasional supporting fire while others launch massive attacks that shred through enemy health bars. More important than all of these though are cards that heal you, giving you the boost needed to fight more demons and get more cards.

So although you can gather enemies as cards to attack other foes with, you also have a deck you can build of your own cards which refresh when you heal. Usually any sort of deck building element in a game would have me incredibly excited, but there’s very rarely any reason to worry about these cards when you grab so many as you go. It also costs currency to edit your deck, which means it feels really bad to bother doing so.

There’s a nice amount of variety to find in Spirit Mancer, with all the themed worlds you’d expect from a game. It’s fun making your way through water worlds and fiery lands, but the excitement of the stages always pales in comparison to the epic boss fights. These battles are always pretty tough, and require a whole lot of dodge rolling and some good reaction times to overcome them.

There are quite a few different systems I haven’t talked about yet in Spirit Mancer, like the fact you can upgrade different cards and your base abilities with currency in the hub world. There are different unlockable weapons, new moves, and straight up power boosts to unlock as long as you have the right coloured gems to do so, which means you’ll want to grab as much of these suckers as possible.

There are lots of ways to grind currency, such as running a guild of villagers that you can ship out on little missions. Otherwise you’ll need to get gems from levels, but with so few gained from combat it always feels a bit miserable to fight every single enemy to earn next to nothing. Hidden chests have way more currency, and with how long combat takes this meant I often just rushed past enemies instead of fighting them.

As much as Spirit Mancer has going for it, I do feel like the combat itself lets it down pretty badly. It’s just not that fun to fight the same basic enemies over and over again, and with each stage featuring dozens and dozens of them just waiting to battle back to back it feels like a bit of a slog. It only took me a few stages to realise I could jump over them all without them even trying to attack me, and the fact I was more excited to do this than fight them probably isn’t a great sign.

Spirit Mancer has a lot of interesting ideas and mechanics, but as a total package it just doesn’t nail the landing. Combat is fine but after a few hours of fighting similar foes it starts to drag, and the distribution of the game’s currency is more than a little off. With lovely pixel art visuals, awesome boss fights and the ability to capture enemies there’s still a lot to love in Spirit Mancer, it’s just a little tough to overlook its issues.