NecroCity- PC (P)review

NecroCity- PC (P)review
Coipher
Latest posts by Coipher (see all)

Genre: Strategic city building tower defense
Developer: Shift Games
Publisher: Games Incubator
Release Date: April 5th, 2023
Edited by AlexKnight2005

You have finally been called! The King himself requests your services as a leader. Are you ready to face the challenges of protecting your realm? Do you have what it takes to gain your glory? Then prove yourself in NecroCity!

In this game, you are placed in the shoes of a Lich Prince Benjamin, brother of the King himself. Benjamin is determined to rise, gain the trust of the ruler, and prove that he is a significant part of the whole Kingdom of Undead.

NecroCity is a very interesting mix of RTS and Tower Defense. When I first thought about such a mix, I got very curious. Because I was wondering which way this can go. And it was indeed something new to me.

The game is built on a traditional TD system. In the center of your base is a Ziggurat, which you have to defend at all costs. Should this building fall, your mission is over. Facing you are several waves of human warriors that can approach your base from several directions. Luckily, before every wave, you can see from which way your enemy is going to attack you, so you should have enough time to coordinate your defending forces.

And to achieve this, you are going to use the RTS part of the game. You don’t just gather one simple resource to build and upgrade as usual, but rather three of them. Bones, ore, and souls. And although these are enough to build up your base, you need to keep an eye on so many more things.

The first thing is your workforce. Making sure you have enough houses for your skeletons is your starting challenge because you need to plan on where you are building to avoid getting assaulted and losing all “living” space. The second is infrastructure. Obelisks give you new areas to build on, and NecroGenerators supply your base with power. Finally third, the third is advanced resource management. To be able to recruit some soldiers, you need to turn your basic materials into processed ones and then turn them into weapons.

And all of that leads to the need for proper management. You need to balance your whole industry to make sure you don’t run out of resources that you might need to bolster your defenses. And that can be quite challenging because since every mission takes place on a very small map, you only get one source of every material. So even if you have the time, you can’t just grow your army indefinitely. Speaking of the army, the variety is not that big. You get to choose between magical or physical units, which both consist of melee and ranged. The only exceptions are several heroes you will get to work with, but those don’t improve the selection a lot. The only thing that I might see as a negative is that since every mission is on just a small map and involves just a few of the enemy attack waves, it might get a bit repetitive after a while. Yes, it can still work as a quickplay tower defense game that you play whenever you have some free time, but I feel like the game has a much bigger potential.

The story is told through text-based conversations that take place between the missions. This is how we get familiar with not just the background characters, like Benjamin, the King, or their advisors and subjects, but also with heroes that you will be able to control on the battlegrounds. The characters are pretty well designed, so the text can get pretty funny sometimes, and in no way does it get boring.

Alongside the text, you will get to see the characters presented in really nice 2D artwork. And those, drawn just like the introduction of the whole tale, are something I enjoyed a lot. It was a very pleasing style that matched the whole game’s 3D design. All of this is available to you even in very high resolutions and nice graphics. Although it’s based in a Kingdom of the Undead, and it all revolves around necromancy, it’s not just a darkness festival. Nicely colored, yet still spooky.

And it is not the only spooky thing that will accompany you throughout the gameplay.

Because the music is very well written to match the whole theme. Slow in the moments between the waves of enemies, fast-paced, and sometimes even silly sounding during the attack. This was another very good job from the designers.

The controls are limited to a mouse and a keyboard, although the keyboard is only used to help with some hotkeys. It is not necessary.

Although some technical details were a bit off. Units’ pathfinding feels weird sometimes; the AI of the units can get a little weird, as you’ll see your soldiers just standing around the enemy and not doing anything, as opposed to them running from their defensive positions to attack any unit getting near, which felt a bit unbalanced.