A simple top-down shooter with RPG elements and a horror theme. You work for a secret “Agency” that hunts down evil things. The Agency gets reports of nasties happening some where and it is your job to fix it. Usually by mowing down loads of undead and other monsters. The main story of the game is, a mysterious person contacts the Agency saying an ancient artifact has been stolen. You must retrieve this artifact because it is very evil.

Release Date

Pros

The graphics are very good with nice, smooth 2d animations. The whole game has the comic/cartoony look to it and it is nicely done.

The music is excellent and matches the whole horror theme very well.

Similar to RIP 3 The Last Hero, as you kill the monsters, you get experience and you can upgrade your character in different ways.

Randomly generated normal missions. Normal missions are not related to the story of the game but are there so that you can fight through and gain experience to level up. They include killing all monsters in the area, rescue lost souls, destroy champion monsters and lifting the curse of the area(ie. destroy the evil symbol in the area).

There are many monster types and they are well done. There are the usual zombies, skeletons, giant spiders, bats and demons just to name a few. They are also quite detailed. Zombies can have their heads shot off, and they just roam around headless. Somtimes you can see just legs walking around. Gargantuan spiders lay eggs which explode into smaller spiders, and werewolves can pounce at you.

Cons

Even though it has randomly generated maps, it is still a simple top-down shooter and does get repetitive.

Other Points

There is an option to turn off gore.

There are power ups and new weapons to pick up, but the number of weapons and power ups are less than that of RIP 3 The Last Hero. Unlike RIP 3 though, you have limited ammunition and must find more as you go. If you completely run out of ammo it is to the trusty two-handed sword you go. There are only eight weapons and six power ups in Larva Mortus.

The action takes place from room to room. Each time you enter a room, there are monsters for you to clear. Once you have completely cleared a room the monsters do not return. However you can choose to leave a room without clearing it, which means if you return, the monsters will spawn again. As the tutorial says, this is one tactic to try and get more ammo.

The game automatically saves your progress each time you complete a mission. You cannot save the game mid-mission which means some mission can take a while, depending on how many rooms were generated and placed for that mission.

Each mission map is randomly generated. So if you died during a mission, doing the same mission again can give you a different map. Unfortunately there seems to be only a handly of combinations. After playing for a while I started noticing maps being repeated.

After completing the campaign, you can continue playing the random missions.

Biases

Reviewed version 1.02.

I really liked RIP 3 The Last Hero.

I have completed the game.

DRM

I cannot remember if the game has DRM.

Minimum Requirements (from the official site)

• Windows XP/Vista or Mac OSX 10.3+, 1.2GHz, 256MB RAM, OpenGL support (recomended)

Computer Played On

• Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz
• 2Gb RAM
• ATI Radeon X1600 256Mb RAM (laptop version)
• Realtek HD Audio(no idea what model) with Altec Lansing ACS41 speakers or Logitech ClearChat Premium PC Headset.
• Win XP Pro
• Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.