Necropolis is a 10 year old contentless console tier slasher brawler with full AAA pricing... charging $30 for a 10 year old game is nuts. Especially when the game has no content, and it's all procgen algorithms... endlessly repetitive. Play the game for 10 minutes and you've played the whole thing.
It's a fantasy/cartoony themed third person hack and slash that feels like a console game but got released exclusively on PC.
Now, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to HBS for making the Battletech game and not screwing it up, major kudos there, but this train wreck dropped my impression of them down to the basement. They pretty much stopped working on the game very shortly after they delivered it, and for me, maybe this is a Windows 11 thing, the game is a sluggish, janky mess. With issues that will never be patched.
For me, annoyingly, the character would just randomly spin around... makes no sense but that's incredibly frustrating. So if you ignore my warnings (and those from other reviewers), and buy this massively overpriced, decade old game, you might not even be able to play it properly.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features low-polygon "retro" assets with cartoony, mobile app style shader effects, making this look like a barely functional mobile app from 15 years ago. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capability to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality game this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me.
Now on to pricing and value for gamers. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
NECROPOLIS: BRUTAL EDITION has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of $30 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games.
For comparison, the $30 asking price for this game could get you games like "Sekiro Shadows Die Twice", "Elden Ring" or "Crusader Kings III". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers.
