One of the best things about the Xbox Live Indie Games catalog is that you can find most genres covered by at least one decent title. the production values will no doubt suffer and it may be rather basic, but chances are you’ll find a game that competently covers the genre you want to play and doing so at a very low price. Lair of the Evildoer is a great example of this, offering players a top-down view, loot-oriented action RPG/dungeon crawl (think Torchlight, Diablo, etc.) for just a dollar. While it has very basic graphics and a few annoying snags in how it plays, Lair of the Evildoer nonetheless does a good job of presenting the most important parts of the genre; lots of enemies to kill, and plenty of new weapons to loot so that you become even better at killing enemies. There’s not much plot, very little pretense that this is an ’epic’ game, it’s just you and the fundamentals of a dungeon crawl.
Unlike many games of its kind, Lair of the Evildoer places a large emphasis on long-range fighting. Your character does have a melee weapon and it is useful, but your best defense against the enemy hordes is to keep your distance and shoot them. You’ll be doing a lot of shooting, since each stage has dozens of enemies within and it will take a lot of exploration to find the stairs leading to the next level. While your arsenal starts out with just basic things like a pistol, shotgun, and baseball bat, you’ll find more exciting items as you go and this is a large part of the game’s appeal. There is also a RPG-style level-up system in place, but it’s extremely basic and simply lets you assign points to four stats that govern traits like accuracy, ranged damage, close-combat damage, defense, and health regeneration. The end result tends to be that your character only shows subtle changes over time as far as RPG stats go, making this part perhaps too basic but not unacceptably so.
Each stage has a pretty simple flow where you scout various hallways, kill the enemies within, loot what supplies they drop (or you find in nearby crates), and continue the process until you find the exit. What makes Lair of the Evildoer unusual is its line of sight system; despite its rather basic 2D graphics, enemies that your character couldn’t actually see from their current location aren’t drawn. Enemies can have some nasty surprises in store for you on occasion due to this, though usually you can just spring their ambush and immediately running away to draw them into a hallway where they can be easily dealt with. This tactic also reveals one of the more noteworthy flaws in Lair of the Evildoer: enemies have trouble getting around corners. They often get stuck on the edges of walls and doors in this way, usually letting you pick off enemies piecemeal. Some stages are much easier than they should be due to this, and it does admittedly take a while before the sheer strength and numbers of the enemy are enough to be a real challenge.
Despite that flaw and how basic the gameplay is, Lair of the Evildoer has its moments. Acquiring some of the ’end game’ weapons is a lot of fun, as you suddenly go from using baseball bats and sub machine guns to ripping through entire crowds of enemies with a mini-gun, rocket launcher, sledgehammer, and more; these weapons do much more to give you a sense of accomplishment than your RPG stats do, and are easily the best part of the game. With each of the twenty or so stages lasting about five to fifteen minutes, you’ll be kept busy mowing enemies down for a few hours and enjoying most of it once you get access to these more interesting weapons.
Lair of the Evildoer succeeds at being a decent action RPG/dungeon crawl at a very low price. If you’re willing to forgive the extremely basic graphics and sound, along with the play mechanics being among the most basic in the genre, you’ll find plenty to like here. Some repetitive segments and AI flaws aside, your $1 USD/80 Microsoft Points will you a few hours of decent entertainment and with that in mind I can easily recommend giving this title a try; it’s a fine way to spend a few hours.
