The Weaponographist Review

I don’t have much experience in the menial sport of dungeon-crawling. I don’t loathe it; I just simply haven’t found any appeal in it, away with the claustrophobic brick tunnels with goblins and spiders lurking around the corner! I’ve never found much stimulation in the litany of almost identical rooms or enemies, excused with a poorly plotted quest. And don’t even get me started with procedurally generated levels that feel all the same. Of course, there are several sorts of dungeon-crawling. However, and forgive my indulgence, almost every dungeon-crawler seems to fall into the same sinful tropes that make dungeon-crawling in videogames a tedious and repetitive deed for me. From Skyrim to The Darkest Dungeon or The Legend of Grimrock; there seems to be uncountable ways to depict a skeleton with a sword. The Weaponographist is the hack-and-slash top-down 2D one, like The Binding of Isaac, also procedurally generated and very much inspired in the early The Legend of Zeldas’ view and presentation. Yet, from all dungeons and heroes, The Weaponographist is the most reprehensible of all known to me.

The Weaponographist, as you can guess, is all about the weapons. Or at least it tries to be. The story begins, paradoxically, with our hero being stripped from all his weapons by a “Witchy Witch” — no kidding, that’s the actual name. On top of that, as a punishment for his greed, she sets a spell on him that prevents him from having more than one of them at a time, which becomes the basis for the chore mechanics of the game. To redeem himself, the hero must help the witch’s village and protect it from the evil that inhabits the dungeon, because every fantastic village has a scary-looking dungeon lying around, duh. From here on, you must fight chamber after chamber, wave after wave of enemies, through the five different levels, or depths, of the dungeon. And you fight each of them a lot.
Starting every level with nothing but your fist-force, you must defeat every chamber in the dungeon as quickly as you can. Once you kill an enemy, you pick up their weapon and proceed to thrust, thrust, thrust; or pew, pew, pew; or slash, slash, slash; depending on whether it’s a spear, a machine gun, a sword, etc. However, for every new weapon that you pick up, and as a result of the witch’s sorcery, the one you’d been using breaks and it’s rendered unusable. Moreover, weapons have limited durability, which forces to keep surveying for that much needed hammer, or that convenient bow, or that rainbow rocket-launching unicorn horn. Spells are much more scarce and powerful, but they barely have one use of two, so they become a reliable option for crowd-control. This multifaceted aspect of the game forces you to adapt quickly and become proficient wielding every single kind of weapon, because if you don’t know how to use a slingshot and that’s all you can lay hands on, you’re screwed.

Additionally, the game has a combo meter, which strengthens your attacks as it goes up, although spend a few seconds not making goblins squeal, and it’ll go down, and with it your power. This meter and the continuous appearance of enemies in the chamber, hurries you to kill each one of them as soon as you can if you don’t want to be outnumbered pronto. This makes up for a frenetic and head-aching combat, which you can’t take your eyes from for a second. Yes, of course, you can pause the game, but we are no wuss, are we? The frantic pace of the game and the fluidity and accuracy of the controls is, sadly, one of the few things to be praised from this game, where a few seconds feel like an eternity. Kill an enemy, dodge an arrow, kill another enemy, dodge a morning star, kill one enemy more, dodge, dodge, kill, and pick up a boomerang-horn; all in about eight seconds.

The problem here is that every depth of the dungeon must be done a pantagruelian number of times. As in any game, you’ll die; which will send you back to the town so you can level up your weapons, spells and other boosts. Then, you can go back into the dungeon and rerun every single chamber that you’ve already done, just so you can get more goo, the currency of the game. Next, you’ll most likely die again and repeat the process. This game is, in reality, all about the grinding, to the point that you generally know that you’re adventuring the dungeon to collect goo and die so you can go back to the town and do some tweaking business. What’s more, you need to level up all weapons, as I’ve explained before, but there are way too many to do so eleven times each. Dungeons are not designed to be beaten in any of the first five attempts at least, because your weapons will be as useful as a chocolate teapot, which translates into more and more grinding. In fact, the few checkpoints are usable only three times and at a colossal cost of goo, which often encourages players to start the whole depth again. The outcome of all these mechanics plus the frenetic beat of the game, will be you lying in bed, in need of a Nurofen and deleting the game from your computer — unless you have to review it, *tears*. Literally, I didn't want to play this game anymore, just because of how dreary and uninspired it is.

Even worse, this game is not particularly original in its themes and visuals. The cartoonish graphics and the pseudo-humorous tone of the game don’t get to cohere with each other. I can see that the game intended to be funny, but it just doesn’t achieve it. The enemies are a clear example: they are a convenient mix of many themes, most of them very unrelated to the fantastic theme. Funnily enough, the only redeemable parts of the game in terms of mechanics happen to be the boss fights, one at the end of each depth, but a robotic dinosaur was just too wacky and disjointedly-themed from the rest of enemies or the dungeon itself. From early ‘20s gangsters to school kids batting you down with a yo-yo, they are a convenient choice towards the framing of weapons, instead of seeking originality and variety within a consistent theme, in this case being fantasy. For instance, the other day I watched a documentary on shaolin weapons, and they all fitted into the same shaolin theme, but there was so much variation in design and techniques among them. Different single swords, double swords, daggers, staffs, whips, spears… In The Weaponographist, they all are too jumbled to make any sense, and even less to represent the demons they are supposed to be.

All in all, The Weaponographist is a game you should stay away from if you want to spare yourself loads of pain, frustration, and awkward jokes. If it’s possible to beat every dungeon in less than ten minutes, but the game takes you more than seven hours to beat, it’s clear that there is too much repetitive grinding involved. Admittedly, there is a slight skill curve, much of it consisting of learning the enemies’ patterns and how to master each weapon. However, there’re too many annoying aspects of the game that’ll force you to quit, unless you enjoy being irritated and failing over and over. For me, there’s only so much of it that I can take, and this game surpassed that amount very early on.