Review: Larva Mortus

Larva Mortus by Rake in Grass is a top down, horror arena shooter. I found the game to have great atmosphere, nice controls and great music.

In Larva Mortus you are an agent of the Agency finishing of the dark forces in a number of missions. There are both free missions and quest missions. The quest missions driving a simple story and beeing somewhat bigger often ending with a boss fight. The free missions are much there for collecting score and ammo.

The game mechanics are clear and simple and basically consists of you running around killing off monsters in rooms forming a level. If you clear a room the monsters will not respawn if you reenter the room at a later point. In the rooms are also various crates, coffins etc that you can destroy for additional goodies, such as extra ammo and time limited bonus abilities like extra damage, or berserk.

You have a nice arsenal of weapons ranging from the broadsword, the mandatory shotgun to more advanced weapons.

In some levels you need to clear all rooms, rescue hostages, find an artifact or kill the boss monster.

There is also some rpg-ish things that i did not get a good understanding of (i.e. level up) and that part seemed more or less glued on.

There are some potential problems in the game design that does not serve the game any good.

The monster respawn thingy could be exploited by a stubborn player to get a high score (= high level). I did not try this and there could potentially be some protection against this.

You regain your health by just idling (I think this is a rather poor game mechanic in general) making the pace of the game slower as you can simply opt to idle in a cleared room to get full health. There is no drawback to idling exept that the game gets boring.

The game quickly becomes a matter of preserving ammo, this is also something that annoys me in a shooter. After clearing a room, you revert to the broadsword to get the crates. It would at least have been nice to be able to stock up on ammo between missions.

The game is a bit on the easy side. I could mostly clear a mission using only the broadsword running around.

Graphics are nice, nothing exceptional but it does the job and sets the mood. At some points it gets a bit cluttered up. There are plenty of graphics and animations for differently damaged enemies, and a headless zombie wandering around without a clue is good fun.

The music is superb and sound effects does the job, though I miss a walking sound for the hero.

All in all I liked Larva Mortus, mostly for the atmosphere and music. There are some design issues that kind of breaks the game for me and I would prefer some more open spaced rooms and faster game play. I think you should try this game.