Part 2 (May 2024) · #3 of 7 in that tierWatch the moment (1:36:48)
Necrosmith 2
- Developed by
- Alawar
- Published by
- Alawar
$7.99
Like a dead man reanimated by dark sorcery, the necromancer simulator is back! Give the undead the ability to fly over mountains and swim across rivers, explore a fully generated world at night and fend off enemy hordes during the day. Start a new, uhm, life.
Consensus
D63.3/100
Steam players78.1% positiveMostly Positive1,531 reviews
VG Insights estimate ↗≈153K copies · ≈$694K gross
What creators say
What players say
A real-time necromancer tower-defense/auto-battler roguelite from Alawar/Amber Jam where you stitch undead minions from monster body parts, send them out to explore a procedurally generated map, and fend off enemy hordes and bosses on a timer.
Steam players rate it Mostly Positive (about 78% of roughly 1,500 reviews, steady in recent reviews too), and most positive reviewers frame it as a cheap, chill, silly minion-builder that is worth buying on sale for 10-25 hours. The two critic reviews on Metacritic (GameGrin 8/10, Movies Games and Tech 7/10) are friendly and stress humor, Steam Deck suitability and the fun of combining parts. Negative reviews focus on a grindy meta-progression, a steep jump in difficulty between the three maps, Titans that make normal units irrelevant, weak inventory/recipe UI, no mid-run save, and late-map FPS collapse and memory problems. Many players see it as an incremental upgrade that could almost have been a big update or DLC for Necrosmith 1. It is a released 1.0 game (Mar 27, 2024, Windows/Mac) with a developer bug-report form on Steam, but several reviewers say known bugs and performance issues have gone unfixed for months.
Players love
- Build-a-minion loop: mixing body parts from different fantasy races and discovering secret recipes is the hook most reviewers enjoy
- Humor and style: sarcastic cat narrator, pop-culture/other-universe creature references, nice pixel visuals
- Improvements over Necrosmith 1: manual control of a single unit, pause to think mid-battle, better part sorting, area-defense orders for minions, more maps/biomes
- Controllable Titans are a fun, pretty power fantasy and a big new mechanic
- Artifacts and body-part variety allow different builds and keep runs interesting
- Chill, low-stress pacing and low PC demands; good on Steam Deck according to critics
- Great value: cheap base price ($7.99) and frequent deep discounts; completionists report around 17-20 hours for 100%
Common complaints
- Severe performance problems in big maps: once most of a map is explored, FPS can fall to single digits or near zero and memory use balloons, sometimes making runs unplayable
- No save during a run; long runs mean leaving the game open, and several players report softlocks that erase ~30 minutes of progress
- Difficulty and upgrade costs spike hard from map 1 to map 2 and 3, forcing repeated grinding (upgrades cited at 15,000-45,000 gold versus ~10,000 gold earned per run)
- Balance: Titans trivialise or dominate fights while normal units are weak against bosses, so unit design matters less than having a Titan
- Recipe/inventory UI is poor: no search, filter or species sorting, constantly shifting part list, and scrolling hundreds of recipes
- Bugs and unfinished details, e.g. mislabeled abilities (two different weapons named Steam Saw), reported unfixed for months
- Audio: units spam loud ability sounds, with several Pharaohs making the game unbearable without muting
Can feel tedious
- Mandatory meta-progression grind, described as mobile-game style, with very expensive upgrades before world 3
- Long stretches of waiting while minions gather resources; the game can turn into an idle/clicker game
- Crafting becomes repetitive: pick five parts and go, and random picks work nearly as well as careful builds
- Secret recipes are hard to discover by trial and error and often feel underwhelming or pointless compared to artifacts; many players just look recipes up
- Being one part short of a desired recipe (also noted by critics)
- Runs take long and cannot be paused by saving, so casual play is hard
- Game feels small and repetitive across its few maps
What's unique
- Necromancer-simulator framing: you play the villain, reanimating monsters from parts to conquer the land
- Five-part minion crafting with set bonuses across fantasy races and 300+ hidden recipes, discovered by experimentation
- Hybrid of tower defense, auto-battler, resource gathering and light management/idle elements, with a countdown timer that ends in a boss fight
- Direct control of one unit at a time plus area defense orders, with giant Titan units as elite constructs
- Day/night style exploration of a fully generated world with lairs to attack and areas to defend; three mini-worlds with story
Players want
- Add a mid-run save or resume, or suspend feature
- Optimise performance and memory for large explored maps
- Add search, filters and sorting for body parts and recipes (including show only craftable recipes)
- Rebalance map-to-map difficulty and upgrade costs to reduce forced grinding; add a game-speed-up option
- Rebalance Titans versus normal units and make unit composition and recipes matter more than artifact stat stacking
- More maps, challenges/handicap modes, new buildings and upgrades, and more story content; some players want a sequel with more variation or multiplayer
- Fix sound spam and mislabeled items
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
Tower DefenseStrategyRogue-liteBullet HellReal-TimeManagementSimulationActionTop-DownExploration
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Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Necrosmith 2 is the sequel to an auto-battling undead-army roguelite where you craft minions and let them fight on their own. He was looking forward to it because the first game had obvious quality-of-life fixes to make, and it does deliver better visuals, better AI and more mechanics such as the Titan. Overall he finds it a step down from the original. The separate small worlds and the overpowered Titan strip out the exploration, adventure and strategy he loved, and he beat the game far faster than the first one.
Liked
Disliked