Undead Horde 2: Necropolis

I spent a couple of sessions with Undead Horde 2: Necropolis half-convinced I was just going to idle through an easy afternoon game, and then suddenly I was theorycrafting item affixes at midnight. Developed and published by 10tons Ltd and released on Steam in March 2023, this top-down action RPG lands somewhere between a hack-and-slash, a light RTS, and a city-builder, without fully committing to any of them. That turns out to be a feature rather than a flaw. The core loop is simple to grasp and hard to stop doing. You roll into an area as a necromancer king, cut down enemies, and raise their corpses on the spot to swell your ranks. Skeletons, rangers, magic users, animals, and stranger unit types all fill different combat roles, and you pick which five types you bring into the field before each sortie. The point-and-direct control scheme is deliberately breezy: you aim your horde at a cluster of enemies or a spawner building, watch the tide crash against it, and hop in with spells and melee attacks when things get dicey. Combat has a satisfying tug-of-war quality where your losses and your recruits are drawn from the same pool of corpses on the ground. The big new addition over the original game is the Necropolis hub itself. Between missions you return here to spend coins, assign nobles to the town hall for passive stat bonuses, slot townsfolk into minion buildings to upgrade specific unit types, visit the anvil to craft gear, and even run the arena to test horde compositions without consequence. Watching a ruined city slowly fill up with residents you dragged back from the battlefield is genuinely satisfying, and it gives the game a meta-progress rhythm that the first entry lacked. The item system layers on top of this with weapon and equipment affixes covering things like command capacity, mana efficiency, raise cooldown, and specialist triggers such as spawning a Wraith every time you raise a unit, or a Lich when a minion dies. Build variety is real enough to support multiple playthroughs, and the endgame allows for some properly absurd compositions. There are friction points worth knowing before you buy. Later zones introduce a grind loop where enemy camps respawn when you exit to the hub, meaning progress can stall into small back-and-forth advances rather than a satisfying push. Some reviewers also noted that the original game's best moment, absorbing a tough boss directly into your army mid-battle, has been replaced by a more abstracted resource system that dulls the spontaneous thrill of that instant payoff. The art style is functional but unchanged from its predecessor, so nobody is buying this for visual ambition. Item variety on the affix side is decent but not deep enough to satisfy dedicated loot hunters. Who is this for? Players who enjoy the summoner fantasy without the mana-management anxiety of something like a full ARPG, anyone who liked Overlord or Pikmin's "indirect control" feel, or fans of the original who want more of the same with a meatier hub. It is a relaxed game by design, never punishing in a way that demands mastery, and that accessibility is a genuine selling point rather than a shortcoming.

Alex · Scout Team

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