Necrosmith 2 Review

The Necromancer sim is back! Or at least that’s what Alawar is telling us. It plays like the lovechild of a roguelike, a tower defence, and an RTS that’s been on the nitrous oxide all night and is sitting giggling in the corner of the room at the end of a particularly raucous student party.

The sequel to the 2022 original game, you protect your tower from all sorts of icky beasties that come at you in waves, unlock buffs for your minions and tower, and uncover artefacts and bases out in the world. There’s an absolute shedload of different combos of body parts and such for you to unlock and play with like the fast show’s overly familiar tailors in an abattoir. Skeleton body with zombie limbs and a reptile head? Suits you sir! Ooh, suits you!
Being a Necromancer, you get to treat body parts like LEGO bricks and mix and match from skeletons, orcs, zombies, mantis-looking things, and even reptiles. Each of your silly hybrid friends can be given a particular task, like defending your tower, getting resources to make more friends, and stomping anyone that isn’t you. Every 15 minutes a giant enemy appears, and luckily you can glom lots of smaller parts together into your own giant undead creation like a slightly icky Megazord.

You get three maps to play on with the enemies becoming harder to squish the deeper into things you get, but you get more combos of bits to play with.

On the maps, Necrosmith 2 all plays like an RTS. You have your tower and as you explore you clear the fog of war to discover more bases, libraries of eldritch secrets, and resources for you to use to make more forces. Unlockable upgrades for your tower give you things like more body parts, faster health regeneration for your friendly neighbourhood armoured beasties, and of course extra damage. You also earn money that you can spend to unlock spells and tower toys as well (which includes your faithful cat. Who is, of course, far smarter than you).

As each run begins you must make sure not to squander resources as they are quite scarce. You start with skeleton bits, but as you progress through you run the bits and races get… silly. Who wants a part zombie, part fairy lizard person that shoots laser? How about a wizard orc that has swamp-person legs and hits things with a pair of axes? Yeah, those are the boring ones.

When you apply a little silliness to the whole caboodle you can unlock secret recipes which boost their stats, although the completionists amongst you will be driven nuts when you’re one or two parts short of the next recipe and you can’t find the buggers.

Necrosmith 2 blends roguelike and tower defence into a fun little sim that lets you micromanage resources, minions and enemies with a lovely little spin on a very crowded genre. But there are annoying pauses in the flow when you’re short on resources and your tower is getting its faeces pushed in by a wave of nasties you can’t stop. That said, finding new toys makes up for those annoying bits most of the time