Necromunda: Underhive Wars

My tolerance for slow turns is higher than most - I've sat through plenty of XCOM overwatch chains without complaint - but Underhive Wars genuinely tested it. This is a third-person, turn-based tactical RPG where you move individual gang members one at a time using Action Points and Movement Points, controlling them directly from a third-person camera across vertical, multi-level maps packed with ziplines, raised walkways, and ambush corridors. The concept is legitimately cool. The execution is a story of squandered potential and a pacing problem so severe it became the title's defining reputation at launch. The actual mechanical bones are worth talking about. Three houses are available at launch - Escher, Goliath, and Orlock - each with distinct traits and five character classes per gang: Deadeye, Brawler, Heavy, Saboteur, and Lay-Mechanic. Loadout depth is real: each class can equip a range of gear from lascannons and sniper rifles to melee blades and pistols, and the focused-shot system lets you target specific body parts rather than just blasting at a health bar. Permanent injuries mean a bad mission can cripple your roster, which adds actual weight to every decision. Looting enemy corpses mid-mission for weapons, managing a gang's skill tree between operations, customizing appearances - when the systems are all running, there is a legitimate tactics game here worth respecting. The problems are not subtle. The campaign serves more as an extended tutorial than a real story, locking out most of the interesting RPG systems until you grind through it. The AI behaves unpredictably and not in a fun way - opponents run circles, cancel actions, and break immersion badly enough that the singleplayer experience feels incomplete. The bigger crime is the turn structure itself: mandatory character-selection popups eat real seconds every round, and you are forced to watch every AI unit animate through its entire action sequence with no speed option, making missions that could take twenty minutes stretch to forty. There were also meaningful stability issues at launch, including hard crashes mid-mission and audio desync in cutscenes, though some of that has been patched over time. The online player count is thin, which is the most serious problem for anyone hoping to spend real time in the 4-player PvP or co-op gang fights that the game was clearly designed around. Where Underhive Wars actually finds its footing is in the Gang mode once you ignore the story and build your own crew from scratch. Crafting a gang, watching fighters level up, losing a Deadeye to a bad mission and having to rebuild - that loop has hooks if you give it time. Mission objectives range from straight elimination to infiltration, supply runs, and timed extractions, and the verticality of the maps gives the Saboteur class real room to disrupt traversal routes and set traps in ways that feel distinct from other tactics games in the genre. For Mordheim veterans or Warhammer 40K lore enthusiasts willing to tolerate the rough edges, there is something here. For anyone else, the low concurrent player count means the PvP endgame is largely inaccessible, and an XCOM fix is better served elsewhere.

Fred · Scout Team

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