The Haunted Hoard: Grumpy Reaper (Wii U)

Grumpy Reaper, or maybe it’s called The Grumpy Reaper, has you playing as a gardener named Grumpy, or perhaps his name is Grog. As you can probably already tell, Grumpy Reaper isn’t the best at conveying information. Its in-game story says very little and sometimes seems poorly translated, and the name it is called on digital storefronts and in its trailer differs from the logo and what many websites call it. The eShop store page calls the gardener Grumpy but in the trailer he is called Grog, and with some bad translation or no translation at parts, it ultimately becomes difficult to stick clear details to a game that seems like it should be a mobile port based on its resource system and presentation but surprisingly it is a Wii U exclusive.

Rooting through some of the conflicting details and trying to rely only on what you see in the game’s scenes that often don’t include many details, the Grim Reaper has had quite a party on Halloween night, and while he’s resting a little blonde girl steals the keys to the underworld and begins to let the undead back out into the world. This girl may be his granddaughter, but the Grim Reaper decides someone else should try and get the keys back anyway, even the load screens recognizing that his reasons for not trying to solve things personally are unclear. The reaper contacts an old gardener who works in a cemetery to try and get back the keys and take care of the undead infestation, but even this manifests in a somewhat odd way as the goal of a stage is usually going to be mowing up every patch of grass, the player not needing to harm the undead as part of that process in many levels. When it comes down to it this is all a poorly presented way of saying you’re going to be mowing graveyards while monsters try to kill you, the differing accounts fairly unnecessary since it could have just thrown you into the action and asked you to mow every graveyard and players likely wouldn’t bat an eye.

When you boot up most levels in Grumpy Reaper though, you can focus on the work at hand. Each graveyard has specific patches of overgrown grass you’ll need to go over with your push mower, the gardener moving on an unseen grid so one press of a direction moves him a square. The skewed isometric perspective means it’s not as simple as pressing up to go up and sometimes environmental decorations might block your view of some grass or a wandering zombie, but mostly it’s not hard to move around and most of the dangers you face are pesky but legitimate threats. Something like the lovestruck zombies can seem hard to overcome when first encountered since it moves faster than you and can chase you, but you’re meant to grab its attention and lure it to a place where you’ll lose her so you can get the grass she’s guarding. The rabbits who throw rocks consistently either have patterns to learn or you can bait out their throws and then get in close where the mower being near scares them into hiding underground. The ghosts, zombies, skeletons, and bats all feel like they have some consistent ideas on how to be dangerous so you can know how to navigate them even if they’re placed in tight areas where you won’t have the time to really learn them save through failing a few times, but it feels like the vampires were poorly done additions. Red regions of the graveyards indicate a vampire will gradually wake up while you stand in that zone, appearing and causing the gardener to run off in a frenzy you can’t control if you spend too long in that area. Some levels practically necessitate spending too much time in those zones though, and while trying to dip in and out of them in the better stages is a nice little bit of pressure, the ones that overdo the vampire’s range are aggravating as you’re either relying on luck to not cause the gardener to ram into a ghost or using resources that don’t come cheap.

As you’re mowing the graveyards of Grumpy Reaper you earn keys and coins. Keys are the more precious resource, these being used to purchase upgrades and occasionally power-ups. In some levels, power-ups appear, some of these like the gas canisters giving you the ability to activate a ride mower that provides brief invincibility and can destroy enemies while others take the form of cards that are automatically used on pick-up. The armor card is limited time protection against an enemy hit, the zombie form power-up lets you sneak around monster-infested spaces but no mowing gets done during it, and the tornado oddly enough has motion controls suddenly arise as you tilt the Wii U gamepad to move a killer tornado around to clear away monsters. It’s not uncommon to find segments that outright require using the power-up and sometimes if you don’t use something like a tornado perfectly a level might be essentially lost, but others like the brief opportunity to play as the Grim Reaper and pass through walls at least regenerate in case things didn’t work out on your use of it.

At any time in a stage, as long as you have the keys for it, you can pay to recover health or fill up your gas tank to get the ride mower power-up, but the expense is often not worth the effort. Keys are rather hard to earn in large numbers, the player getting a guaranteed key on completing a level and able to get two more from that level if they finished the level quickly enough and killed every enemy in it. Getting the speed-based key will often require precise play, but the enemy killing key can sometimes cost more than it’s worth. Many stages won’t provide you the means to kill the undead with so you’d have to buy the gas to use the mower and take out the monsters, and in larger stages this can even end up requiring multiple activations to further put you in the hole. You can play all of the games 40 stages without needing extra keys to win, but the keys also serve as currency elsewhere. The upgrade shop is where you can make the ride mowers last longer and increase your pitiful one heart to a more respectable set so you can survive more than one hit, but investing in the time power-ups last is crucial too and a lamp for dark levels requires some keys so you can have a better chance of seeing where you’re going. Upgrades become costly quickly and are far better uses of keys than mid-level power-ups, this imbalance exacerbated by how often a stage will only grant you a key or two save for the coin rewards.

Coins can be found about levels and surprisingly enough aren’t used to buy anything despite Grumpy Reaper’s trailer saying they can. The enemy costumes that will start making the zombies, ghosts, and skeletons look a little different are level clear rewards only, the coins instead being added up at the end of the level and instantly redeemed for keys. It takes 200 coins to get a key and you also get an amount of coins for simply completing the level, but even in a level flush with them you still might at best get three extra keys when fully upgrading something like your health or mower will go beyond a hundred keys in total. This definitely makes those moments where you die in a longer level and it asks for 10 keys if you want to continue without losing a progress a deal you never want to take, the amount of time you’d need to earn those keys back far more than what you’d lose just starting from the beginning of a stage. There is no way to buy keys with real money though, this seemingly manipulative level of scarcity perfect for the mobile game Grumpy Reaper’s menu implies it could be and yet it avoided the temptation.

When you’re in a level it can often be good to pretend the key economy doesn’t exist and just play the level as a decent action puzzle, the player needing to safely navigate around the graveyard to both survive and hit the grassy spots. Some levels add a timer to the affair and they can be surprisingly tight, but this encourages a bit more of the actual interesting play where you’re learning the way you need to move to do your job safely and efficiently. Switches and teleportation gates start to complicate things some, and levels based purely on surviving a huge group of monsters throw in a level type that breaks up the string of similar stages that can sometimes blend together otherwise. There are good levels in Grumpy Reaper when the variables come together right and ones that are difficult in a fair and enjoyable way, but even if you do your best to pretend the keys aren’t often limiting the fun in some way, you then have the game’s poor programming to contend with.

Grumpy Reaper has a bad habit of crashing. It crashed when I finished a level once (although thankfully the clear was saved), it crashed once when I used a teleportation gate in a stage, and it crashed after I died and tried to head back to the main menu. On some load screens visual artifacts appear on the far right, and sometimes when you die the animations don’t play properly so the gardener is standing up just fine. The crashes are definitely the element that actually damages the experience as you can’t be too sure when one might happen and what progress could be lost for it, and with more of the game’s levels being average rather than excellent Grumpy Reaper makes it so it’s not really worth it to push through such potential technical problems.

THE VERDICT: Grumpy Reaper sometimes shows it does have a good idea for some arcadey fun, the levels that make you earn your win by mowing right and dealing with the monsters properly actually satisfying to complete. However, then you have stages that push concepts like the vampires too far or deny you key rewards unless you’re willing to spend more keys than you’d even get back, and with the upgrade system tied to heavy key investment, keys as a resource end up a bother rather than a way to earn nice benefits. With the game being prone to crashes as well, Grumpy Reaper struggles to even present its better stages, a potentially enjoyable game concept squashed beneath the mishmash of obstructions to experiencing it properly.

And so, I give Grumpy Reaper for Wii U…

A BAD rating. Let it speak well of the potential of the actual gameplay side of Grumpy Reaper that it didn’t achieve a lower rating. Level designs can work at times, although a bit egregiously a few of the final stages are rehashes of earlier levels with almost no obvious changes. Finally conquering a tough design that is playing fair can be a fulfilling little slice of time in a game that otherwise tests your patience as its key system struggles to find a good balance. Once you’ve beat all forty levels you’ll still not be anywhere close to having the keys needed for the power-ups unless you really devoted an absurd amount of time to replaying levels, and since goal-based keys like finishing a level are only provided once, it would be a lot of leaning on coins or wasting keys to get that singular key for clearing out all of the stage’s undead. The power-ups are mostly fine concepts even if their implementation is sometimes odd, but Grumpy Reaper doesn’t seem to know how to balance things out so the good levels crop up at unexpected points in the same way the poorly structured ones do. The key economy would need a big overhaul to get things back on track to consistent and compelling progress, coins perhaps the better way to earn mid-level power-ups since you actually collect them in stage and you can try to collect extra to offset costs, but really the biggest improvement would just be a general clean-up. Make the game stable so the likelihood of crashes don’t keep you on edge, clean up some of the odd way the minimal story is conveyed, and reconsider the level goals so that trying to go for the bonus goals is something that won’t feel like a bad investment.

Whatever you want to call this game, whatever it wants to call itself, it’s clear that Grumpy Reaper is a bit of a mess, but what might seem like growing pains for developer Drakhar Studio as they move away from simplistic mobile game development to console games becomes a less believable excuse when you learn they’re behind Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures. 6 years after this Wii U game and they put out another game with programming problems that are inevitably going to crop up, but at least Grumpy Reaper had a more original concept behind it than their future work. Grumpy Reaper’s ideas could maybe be done better by some other studio, but in the hands of this Spanish developer, Grumpy Reaper was seemingly doomed to a grim fate from the get-go.