- Publisher: Harebrained Schemes LLC
- Release Date: Jul 12, 2016
- Also On: PlayStation 4, Xbox One
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
-
PC PowerPlayAug 27, 2016Takes two great ideas and merges them into a half-baked mess of poor controls and monotony. [Issue#254, p.59]
-
Sep 1, 2016After a few runs I’d heard all the jokes, fought all the enemies, and seen all of the mild shifts in aesthetics. I wanted to rush through the content I’d already seen and finally, hopefully, get a glimpse of something new, but this Souls-inspired combat prides itself on punishing the impatient, and hasty Necropolis players get a full reset. This was my internal struggle—I wanted to get the game over with, but I didn’t want to be even more bored with it by repeatedly dying and restarting in the process.
-
Aug 8, 2016In the annals of dungeoneering, Necropolis stands out for its lack of imagination.
-
Aug 4, 2016Perhaps Necropolis’s worst sin is that it doesn’t motivate you to keep going. Sloppy mechanics can often be forgiven if the game has something compelling going for it; just ask Deadly Premonition. Here, however, players have no incentive to continue. The unfunny humor exists solely to mock the player. Every twist and turn, you’re greeted with another joke that undermines your quest and the importance of it. Your quest never feels purposeful or epic. Instead, it just feels like an insignificant afterthought.
-
Jul 17, 2016It refuses to treat your protagonist's quest seriously, which in turn undermines the serious gameplay.
| This publication does not provide a score for their reviews. | |
| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
-
Jul 13, 2016Necropolis at launch has just enough going for it for those who want a Dark Souls-styled experience that can be easily dropped into and out of. Instead of having to memorize incredibly tough passages like in the Souls games, players can boot Necropolis, tear through some randomly difficult sequences with satisfying weapons, and log off, having gotten a solid action fix. But the game would benefit from serious tuning and more variety in its random level generation. While some of the generated levels feel expansive, huge, and impressive, many of them feel a little sleepy and same-samey. (Also, Harebrained needs to turn on public matchmaking for co-op post-haste.)
-
Jul 19, 2016It’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.
-
Jul 21, 2016For all of the lack of variety in Necropolis, or the woes of its combat system, perhaps that is the most severe of all its flaws. Despite our collective hopes for reconciling two admired approaches to game design, it’s a title that embodies an intrinsic conflict between the sustained long-term engagement and clockwork precision of Dark Souls and the rapid-fire bursts of calculated chaos in contemporary roguelikes. Harebrained Schemes’ ambitious, but ultimately miscalculated, attempt inevitably collapses under the weight of its own insurmountable tensions.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 16 out of 51
-
Mixed: 13 out of 51
-
Negative: 22 out of 51
-
Jul 13, 2016
-
Jul 12, 2016
-
Jul 13, 2016