Necropolis Reviews
Ghoulish creature design and fun combat are weakened by long boring stretches, clueless AI, and snickering obscurity.
The stylish visuals and streamlined combat that define Necropolis slowly succumb to repetition, laying waste to this roguelike’s longevity. If you have three friends, multiplayer is the way to go.
Can you play Necropolis by yourself? Only if you're really dedicated to the idea of running the same series of floors over and over with the intention of making progress. Without company, the initial dungeons begin to blend together a bit, and restarting isn't so much a pain from a pure skill-based roguelike standpoint, but a crisis of variety.
While roguelike and roguelike-inspired games such as these feel like a dime a dozen in recent times, Necropolis stands out simply by being the best that it can be, with a striking visual style, great sense of humor and an enjoyable co-op mode working together with immense, randomized, yet terrifically-designed levels and some great combat.
Necropolis fails to capture the magic of its influences
A stylish roguelike both made and hampered by its own pacing.
Necropolis pulls many ideas together to ultimately deliver a satisfactory, short dungeon-diving experience that’s best enjoyed with friends. Some of its ideas conflict with each other (such as permadeath and teammate revival), its procedural generation doesn’t offer much in the way of replayability, and its intentional vagueness can be frustrating, but it’s good for at least a few monster-smashing runs before it gets old thanks to enjoyable combat mechanics, cheeky humor, and the promise of mystery.
Necropolis is destined for a lot of love/hate reactions. It’s fun, challenging, stylish and sardonically cool, but frustration is coded into its roguelike DNA. With a few tweaks and online matchmaking it could still be a minor indie classic – it’s surprising how hard it is not to go back in for another run – but it’s a game that needs some work if it's to please a wider base of fans.
An interesting attempt to cross Dark Souls with a roguelike, but it’s not a very well mixed cocktail and the ingredients really needed to be chosen with more care.
It refuses to treat your protagonist's quest seriously, which in turn undermines the serious gameplay.
It’s a clumsy, dull, shallow, lacklustre trudge through cold soup. And fails at the most important aspect of any game in the genre: making me want to have another go.
A game that tries too hard to be what it's not. A roguelike game trying to be a soulslike. Losing its identity, the result is simply a missed shot, nor good or bad enough to be worth remembering.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The premise of Necropolis sounds fun, and it certainly starts off that way, but once things start to get repetitive the game slows down to a familiar grind.
Necropolis combines two great tastes that taste awful together
The premise of a procedurally generated rogue-like experience is fun, but Necropolis needs more.
Necropolis is saved by a strong sense of challenge, and by the resource management system, the only mechanism that meets happily with procedural design of the production.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Roguelike hack-and-slasher Necropolis offers intense combat and a quirky setting, along with repetition, confusion, and permadeath difficulty.