Description
A playthrough of LJN's 1995 license-based action-platformer for the Super Nintendo, Warlock.
Based on the 1993 horror film Warlock: The Armageddon, Warlock for the SNES begins with the titular son of Satan (Julian Sands) scheming to gather the ancient druid runestones that, when brought together, possess the power to destroy existence. You, a modern druid warrior who wields magic powers inherited from your ancestors, have to battle the forces of evil and gather the runestones before the Warlock can get his hands on them. The thirty-two stage adventure begins in a quaint New England town and sees you battling your way through libraries, graveyards, castles, catacombs, and mountain passes as you wend your way toward the fiery depths of Hell for the final battle.
As a druid warrior, you have three primary ways of defending yourself. You can shoot energy bursts from your hands; you can psychically fling a boomeranging orb; and you can cast a wide range of offensive and defensive spells using the items you've collected.
The moody backdrops, grim color palette choices, and the music's heavy use of choir pads do a nice job of establishing the tone, and the levels are generally straightforward in their layouts - most containing a couple of branching path and out-of-the-way item caches - that have to be taken at a carefully measured pace. The platforming requires a lot of precision, and blindly rushing ahead will generally leave you cornered in a no-win situation. Enemies appear with little warning in the least ideal places, and they hit hard, so your best bet in most cases is to inch forward and handle threats one at a time. It gets easier as you learn where and when to anticipate attacks, but it's always demanding. It's among the hardest of the SNES games I've played.
So long as you're patient enough to weather its brutal difficulty curve, Warlock is a solid late-gen SNES platformer with a lot of content to sink your teeth into. I didn't love it, but I liked it more than I thought I would.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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