Part 2 (May 2024) · #7 of 13 in that tierWatch the moment (1:33:00)
Necrosmith
- Developed by
- Alawar
- Published by
- Alawar
$2.99
A necromancer simulator. Assemble the dead using different body parts while upgrading your tower, combine the abilities of the different fantastic races to fight your way through the hordes of enemies and overrun the ’chosen ones’. To tell the truth, the dead are pretty, uhm, dumb.
Consensus
C70.3/100
Steam players85.7% positiveVery Positive5,367 reviews
Metacritic ↗Users: 7.5/10
VG Insights estimate ↗≈161K copies · ≈$330K gross
What creators say
What players say
A pixel-art necromancer tower-defense/action roguelite by Alawar where you stitch together undead minions from body parts, send them out to destroy enemy lairs, and upgrade your tower to escape.
Necrosmith is a cheap (about $3) cult-ish indie that Steam players rate Very Positive (about 86% of roughly 5.4k reviews in the local Steam data), with the body-part monster-crafting hook as the near-universal draw. The main complaint is that once you build your army you have very little control: minion AI is weak, you can only directly steer one unit at a time, and the game leans on grind and difficulty spikes. Critics barely covered it: Metacritic has no critic score and only a 7.5 user score from 4 ratings, and no OpenCritic entry could be found. The Steam store page shows recent reviews slipping to Mostly Positive (about 76% on a small sample), and some recent negatives say it has not been updated in years, while a sequel, Necrosmith 2, exists and several reviewers say it fixes the first game's control problems. It is a full release (not early access).
Players love
- The body-part assembly system: mixing limbs, cores and weapons into odd creatures (skeleton chickens with lasers, vampires, robots, dragons) is called addictive and funny
- Recipe discovery: valid combos are saved to a book, get cheaper in mana and gain bonus stats, and can be summoned with one click
- Sense of progression and learning across runs; the game speeds up and gets fun after some early upgrades
- Pixel-art style, dark humor and personality; compared by reviewers to Vampire Survivors and old Flash games
- Very cheap; reviewers say it is worth a few dollars, with roughly 10-30+ hours of play reported
- Large variety of unit types to build, which reviewers applaud
- Good for casual, low-stress 'throw parts together and see what happens' sessions
Common complaints
- Minion AI is poor: units wander out of the base area, into dangerous biomes, and fail to defend the tower
- Direct control is limited: only one creature at a time via WASD, and the control spell reportedly lasts only a few seconds before the camera snaps back with very sensitive scrolling
- Late-game balance: enemy lairs spawn swarms far stronger than your units, and the 15-minion cap makes that hard to overcome
- Boss/timer pressure combined with meta progression that is weak early and then near-mandatory (e.g. daily starting parts upgrade), so runs can feel walled
- Permanent upgrades can make completing the game harder according to one reviewer, and one says it takes at least 3 runs for a single upgrade
- Limited replayability and depth: short, no story, strategy reduces to picking which units to keep and casting spells
- Some players report launch crashes or black screens on old installs, and the map is not very interactive
Can feel tedious
- Slow, grindy start before upgrades make the game 'even out'
- Micromanaging minions or spamming the control spell because the AI cannot be trusted
- Heavy RNG on parts and repetitive late-game loops
- Needing several runs per meta upgrade
- Some players say they do not understand how to win, and a few threads ask whether micromanagement is required
What's unique
- Necromancer workshop fantasy: you build the army from harvested body parts rather than picking premade units
- Hybrid of tower defense, action roguelite, light strategy and factory/automation management
- Tower upgrades (assembly line, cat house, blueprints) are gathered by destroying enemy lairs, with the goal of building an escape from the world
- Recipe book that unlocks cheaper, stronger versions of discovered combos
Players want
- Better AI and stronger tactical commands (defend area, ranged units keep distance, hold position without being defenseless)
- Make the 'control minion' effect last until cancelled, or allow finer control of more than one unit
- Auto-craft specific units when parts are available and auto-sell surplus parts for mana
- Rebalance late-game enemy lair spawns and the 15-unit cap, and smooth the jump in meta-upgrade value
- More interactivity and variety in the map and more content/replay value
- Clearer guidance on recipe discovery (a Steam thread asks how to intuit recipes)
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
ZombiesAction RoguelikeTower DefenseRogue-liteBullet HellStrategyTop-DownRogue-like2DPixel Graphics
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Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Necrosmith is a base-builder where you assemble undead monsters from collected parts and send them out to fight and gather more parts. The world expands as your monsters grow stronger, unlocking new biomes and base additions. He found it immersive and fun to explore, almost a guilty pleasure. The AI is poor, it gets repetitive, and it plays more like a campaign than a roguelite. He places it in a middling tier, which he calls mid B.
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