Kind of mixed, good gameplay but maps are a bit too large and key-y

What you've got here is a retro game which draws a lot of inspiration from Heretic and Hexen, which is to say it's a fantasy-based spell-em-up rather than sci-fi or military shooter. You are "The Necromancer", just out for a stroll minding your own business when all manner of wild and crazy critters start accosting you and asking if you'd be good enough to supply them your soul. You will have to fight through your way through three different hubs and a few extra intermediary levels to get to the head guys and explain how you little you appreciate their shenanigans. Very similar to Hexen in that regard.

Along the way you've got a nice assortment of abilities to defend yourself, from the basic staff of firebolts to plink enemies at long range, a tornado to push enemies into pits, hand grenades, a blunderbuss, and more, all reasonably satisfying to use and each having their own alternate fire modes as well. Ammo is not plentiful so you have to be fairly careful with how you use your weapons. That and rely heavily on your *alternate forms!*. Despite being named "Hand of Necromancy", the ability to resurrect enemies isn't that great because your resurrected goons have absolutely terrible pathing and necromancy uses "ammo" like your regular attacks. Instead this game should really be called "Hand of Polymorph", because being able to change yourself into different critters each with three different attacks and other special features is really the defining attraction here. You can switch into critter forms as many times you want, and THEIR attacks use a recharging energy system instead of ammo.

I would rate the difficulty as being slightly on the low side of "medium". If you're looking for ultra gratuitously difficult retro games this isn't it. While you have no armor, which causes enemies to be able to kill you in only a few hits, you move at Doom-standard speed of light. Once you have learned the different attacks of each enemy type and know which way to dodge, you'll find few enemies are particularly dangerous at long range. The toughest points involve ambushes, and for that you've got health potions and damage resistance powerups that you can pick up and bring with you to use at just the right moment. This leads to Hand having a slightly more tactical feel to it, where if you rush in and get cornered you'll probably die fast but proceeding carefully shouldn't pose too many hardships.

Map-wise, Hand is significantly less confusing than Hexen was. You will still have to do a lot of switch pulling, but for the most part you can either see what the switch does or it's explained where you should look. There are a few times where I had to spend some time looking for a less-obvious path forward: Most of the levels make great use of vertical height which unfortunately means the map feature is generally useless. But I only got outright stuck once for about 15 minutes. And you never have to do the "switch in map A opens a secret door in map B" nonsense. The only real criticisms I have against the maps are firstly, the quality seems somewhat uneven? Some of them are much larger and more detailed than others, I'm not sure if some maps are older or done by different people, but you'll notice. And secondly, some maps have huge "loops" where you can find yourself missing the path forward and instead come back to the start by an alternate path. The only times I got really confused were because of these loops. If I had reached a dead-end instead it would have been a lot more obvious where to focus my search.

In terms of production values, Hand feels like a slight downgrade from Hexen. The maps have great geometry and texture work, but the enemy art is a little too clean, and there's a little too much open space devoid of decorations. Hexen overall just feels more gritty in its presentation. However I encountered zero significant bugs at all, so that earns some points back. At the price this game is asking, they are more than delivering.

Overall, Hand of Necromancy is a decent game that should keep you going for about a dozen hours. While the theme and graphics are not revolutionary, adding the necromancy feature and especially the various beast forms you can become elevates this from just a clone to an interesting remix of the formula. If you like guns and missiles and AI villains this probably won't be your thing, but if you remember Hexen and wish "Man I wish Hexen had less BS switch and secret door hunting and that I could turn into a dragon", this is it.

Nice game. Made me feel nostalgic. No checkpoints, you save manually. Like old school classics.

Well done team 💪👏