It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since I reviewed the first entry in the Undead Horde series, and in case you need a refresher, I wasn’t the biggest fan of it. It was far from being a broken release; I chalked a lot of it up to my personal preference opposed to things that were functionally wrong with it. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the newest in the series, Undead Horde 2: Necropolis, which manages to take everything I was meh or downright hated about the first and somehow made it significantly worse.

The only area that showed any improvement was the narrative, which is fully fleshed out and dare I say, interested me enough to push through this game as much as possible. Whereas the first had a vague story to hold all the components of the game together, this time around the living are actually kind of the bad guys and give you a valid reason to destroy them. Through some form of magic, they’ve figured out a way to bottle the dead within the confines of a jar, thus causing the world of the dead, the titular Necropolis, to fall apart. It’s then up to the Necromancer to return the lost souls to their rightful place within the world. This was a well-written tale that packed plenty of puns and dad jokes that may not have made me laugh, but they gave me plenty of ammo to throw at my son who is the king of puns within my household.

Visually, this game is a huge step backward from the first, mostly due to the fact that the Roblox-looking visuals make their return while everything else looks the same. While I kind of expected this before I even booted up the game, I didn’t expect it to pan further out than before. This not only makes determining which unit is winning in a chaotic battle more difficult, it makes everything look worse, almost like going from looking at a dog turd in your yard and then going to the second floor of your home to see if it still looked like shit from that point of view. I wasn’t expecting Diablo 4-level improvements here, but something that would bring us further into the current generation of visuals than what we received here would have gone a long way. At a minimum, I wish we could have the option to pan in and out, or some form of dynamic scaling at the least.

The AI is just as wonky and actually somehow managed to suck more, largely due to the way they are controlled. I can’t remember if this was the same format as the first, but the way you control the hordes is downright frustrating as all of the commands are based on how you use the LB button. Most of the time if I wanted them to group on me, they’d go forward; if I wanted them to attack, they’d stand there with their thumbs up their butt, or whatever skeletons have in place of rectums. I just wish 10tons took another note from Overlord and assigned the right stick to control them as this would’ve made for a much better and less frustrating experience overall.

The gameplay loop here is largely the same, but with what feels like even more fetch quests, which means generally means walking from point A to point B in places you’ve already visited, some of which don’t even respawn enemies, so you’re literally just walking to fetch something for a neverending cast of NPCs. In each area, a count that exceeded 40 with a strangely odd number that personally drove my OCD wild, you’ll also be tasked with killing every enemy on the level in order to get the pickled soul to bring back to Necropolis that will, in turn, unlock various buildings that house vendors, upgrade givers and the like. I will be the first to call out when a game is too short for the asking price, but this felt like it was tipped too far in the inverse and became stale rather quickly.

I am not sure if I have just grown in the time since I played the original title, but I found this game to be much easier, mostly due to being more observant and playing much more cautiously than I normally would, but the wealth of player upgrades and the like seemed to be much more impacting this go around. The Necromancer’s melee weapon is the one exception to this since most of the different weapon classes only seem to differ in the damage output and speed of attack. I leaned on the quick and high DPS output weapons in my playthrough so that even if I lost most of my horde, I was still an efficient killing machine. I found a few of the levels to spike in difficulty out of the blue, but I rarely died on any specific area more than once or twice. The quick travel points and health fountains seemed to be spaced out a little better, and the persistent map on the screen makes finding ones that you may have skipped over earlier in the level much easier.

I might be the outlier here, as the Steam user reviews are sitting on overwhelmingly positive as of this writing, but Undead Horde 2: Necropolis didn’t click with me. As someone who doesn’t really enjoy strategy games, this was already going to be a bit of a chore for me. With this being said, if you liked the first entry, you’ll likely find something here to love. I on the other hand will sit patiently until 10tons LTD. opts to give Jydge or Time Recoil the sequels they deserve.

5 out of 10

Pros

• A Fully Fleshed-Out Narrative
• Tons of Puns
• Lots of Game for the Price of Admission

Cons

• A Little Too Much Game for the Price of Admission
• Wonky Controls
• The Panned out View Makes it Look Worse than the Original
• The AI is Still Dumb

Undead Horde 2: Necropolis was developed and published by 10tons. It was released on NS, PC, PS4, PS5, X1 and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on Xbox and played on an XSX. If you’d like to see more of Undead Horde 2: Necropolis, check out the official site.

 

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