While I truly love indie games for the fact that they’re often willing to take risks and combine elements of play you’re not used to seeing together, there’s no question that the results of said risks aren’t always a success. In that vein, Spirit Mancer takes what I’d consider to be a “kitchen sink” approach, pushing together classic side-scrolling hack-and-slash, shooting, and even some deckbuilding play into one package. While that may absolutely give it a novel feel, I’d also say it doesn’t quite work out the further you go with it.

Initially I’ll admit that your variety of options for taking down foes felt somewhat refreshing, being able to move between melee attacks, a ranged weapon of some kind, or a variety of single-use summoning cards you have at your disposal. Better yet, as you move through stages you’ll tend to get periodic opportunities to grab different guns, though their effectiveness can vary wildly, as well as a shot at capturing your attackers to then have available to use as cards. You’ll need to be somewhat mindful of what’s effective for each type of monster, but once you’re on top of things you’ll be able to break their defenses and suck them up. Considering that you do have a limited capacity for cards you’ll want to keep using them with some regularity, and if nothing else they can act as great distractions for your enemies.

The problem ends up being that it doesn’t feel like it takes very long for what felt like a load of potential to fall a bit flat. Too much combat simply feels like you are facing the same enemies over and over, with you defeating them starting to get a bit dull. You could look for some saving grace in building up a deck of powerful core cards to make use of, but with the high bar set by so many deckbuilders on the system, this implementation just feels far too limited. While I credit its solid visuals and interesting mix of elements, it just doesn’t quite seem to come together fully.