Review of Necromunda: Underhive Wars

Introduction

As seen in the title, this will review Necromunda: Underhive Wars. I decided to start this website because I ran out of room while writing my review of the game on Steam.

Also, don’t forget to check out our merch store. We sell dnd dice sets, gamer t-shirts as well gamer room decoration.

Now to begin, I was really looking forward to this game coming out. I played Mordheim, made by the same company, and absolutely loved it.

I was hoping this game would be Mordheim set in the 41st Millennium, but it was not.

Just in case you don’t know what Necromunda is (and you very well might not know if you are not a Warhammer fan), it is a game set in the 41^st Millennium.

In this time, mankind is at war with many different races, and while they control a large amount of the universe, they don’t control everything, so a way that I have heard the 40k universe described is a grim dark universe where war is constant.

Now, this particular game is set on a planet called Necromunda. Necromunda is what they call a hive world. The planet is polluted due to excessive manufacturing on Necromunda, so most people live in hive cities.

In the hive cities, everything is recycled from the water, air and even food. Now at the top of hive cities, you have the rich who live in decadence, and the conditions worsen as you go lower and lower in the hive.

In Necromunda, there’s the imperial house at the top of the food chain. Then you have the houses that are beneath them, and now while each of the houses provides a service that contributes to Necromunda, such as House Escher providing drugs and medicine, House Goliath providing tough workers and House Orlock being miners and bikers who provide the raw materials that the other houses use the gangs also view with each other for power.

This is especially at its worst in the Underhive, which is where rival gangs of the houses actually fight for control of territory for prestige and credit (their version of money). This is where the game takes place.

In the beginning, a campaign mode takes you through a story that introduces different aspects of the game to you as you go through the campaign.

There are three houses to choose from at the moment: House Escher, House Goliath and House Orlock, and they are all different.

Now this game is based on a tabletop miniatures game called Necromunda. This game was initially released in the 90s, but Game Workshop (the producer of this game) rereleased the game, I believe, in 2016.

Now I have yet to play the tabletop game. Still, I ended up buying the eBook versions of all the rules that have been released so far and was really looking forward to seeing if the video game version matches up with the tabletop version, and sadly it doesn’t.

One of the exciting things about the tabletop game is that each House has its own list of equipment they have access to, and each house list is pretty different. For instance, House Escher can access cheap poisoned weapons and laser guns.

The cheap poisonous weapons play into their style as they are an all-woman gang and rely on cunning and subterfuge to defeat their opponents, making them the exact opposite of House Goliath.

House Goliath consists of vat-grown giants much tougher and stronger than a regular human. As a result, they are much more direct in their tactics and straightforward and have no problem using guns to blast their way to victory or heavy pipes to bash their opponent’s heads in.

The last house is House Orlock. They consist of miners and bikers, and they are all-rounders. Not really bad at anything, but not really good at anything.

There are other houses in the tabletop game that will hopefully be released later in the video game, but so far, we just have House Escher, House Goliath and House Orlock.

The Good

I will start with the good as there are a few good things about this game, and I hope they fix some of the problems I will discuss in the bad section.

Now some of this will compare this game to Mordheim as this would make for a direct comparison.

The strategic elements

The strategic elements added to this game are top-notch, especially in comparison to Mordheim. There are five character classes in this game: the Dead-eye, Brawler, Heavy, Saboteur and Lay-Mechanic (and engineer class).

Now, you usually would kind of want one of each class, and when you are playing the game, you can only have 5 gangers in your gang at a time in a mission, including your leader (which will be one of the classes).

Now the Dead-Eye class is essentially like a sniper. They get the ascension ability, which means they can use a grappling hook to get to high places that they may not usually be able to reach, which for them is great as when you are on a level above an enemy, you get an advantage when shooting at them. They get a disadvantage when shooting you.

Before I move on, there are weapons in this game that are only available for use by certain classes, like the heavy bolter or lascannon can only be used by the heavy class.

That being said, a heavy class in an Escher ganger can use the same heavy weapons as a Goliath or Orlock-heavy character.

The Brawler class is just that, a close combat fighter, so there’s not much to same more. The Heavy class can use a heavy gun such as a lascannon (big laser gun) or a heavy bolter (a technologically advanced machine gun whose bullets explode when they hit the target), so you generally want to take the high ground with them.

They also have an ability that when they are on a level above an area, they can watch an area below. Any time an enemy attempts to move through the area the heavy are covering, they can take a shot at them, which is excellent for covering chokepoints where the enemy will have to move through or cover their reinforcement areas.

Next, we come to the Saboteur. The saboteur typically has flame weapons for attacking enemies close to each other. Still, they can also lay traps and sabotage areas to turn them into traps and damage zip lines.

Zip lines are scattered throughout the maps to help you get from one level to another, so sabotaging a zip line can make it difficult for an enemy to get to you unless, of course, the lay mechanic on the enemy side fixes the zip line.

Now the lay mechanic can fix zip lines that have been damaged, but they also have the ability to erect barricades that can’t be crossed unless the barricade is blown up with a grenade or a heavy weapon.

All of these character classes combined allow for a strategic depth of gameplay that I don’t believe was present in Mordheim (that being said. Currently, Mordheim is still the superior game).

The Campaign

The campaign story is rock solid. It teaches you how to play the game well, and the story is also very engrossing. Apart from encountering bugs like not being able to drop items when you have activated an aura on a character, the campaign was fantastic.

It created this remarkable story to showcase the environment and setting of Necromunda. The maps for the game are beautiful and make you feel like you are in a post-apocalyptic setting.

The Maps

The maps for this game are brilliant as they have lots of choke points and zip lines and really capture the essence of what it would be like to live in post-apocalyptic settings.

Improvements over Mordheim

This next section will cover specific improvements over Mordheim, so if you haven’t played Mordheim, feel free to skip it as it will not be relevant to you.

More space to carry items

One of the things that used to annoy me about Mordheim was the limited amount of space each character had to carry items which in that game was really punishing as you had specific quotas of warpstone you had to reach, which meant you really needed the space to carry warpstone and couldn’t waste it on anything else for the most part.

They have fixed this problem with this game, as each ganger can carry 7 items, and specific items only take up one item slot. For instance, you can put up to seven medi-kits in the same item slot, which only takes one item slot.

This is much better, as it never made sense to me why those mad-cap mushrooms from Mordheim took up the same space as a weapon. Necromunda now has a much more elegant solution.

No more quotas to meet

Now I am sure that some people liked the quotas. Still, I have to say I didn’t because it meant saving your warpstone for when you needed to use it for quotas, as you could end up in a terrible position where your leader died. Now you can’t go on missions to get that warpstone, and you would fail that quota, and if you did that multiple times, you would have to start a new gang.

Now in Necromunda, there are no quotas to meet. You just make credits and use those credits to buy whatever you want, including weapons, medi-kits etc.

Easier to make money in this game

It’s easier to make money (credits) in this game as you have more space to hold items. Also, they sell for more. In fact, it’s actually easier to make money by selling weapons you have looted from an opposing gang than by completing the mission objectives.

Some people won’t like this, but I certainly do.

Training doesn’t take money and cost days

In Necromunda, you can use XP to purchase new skills, upgrade skills or upgrade stats. The upgrades get progressively more expensive as you increase stats and skills, but there is no more paying money for this or the training period as the ganger gets the skill or stat upgrade instantaneously

The Bad

The bugs

The bugs, oh boy, the bugs. I have not played a single mission without having the game crash at least once. It’s lucky that it saves every turn, as otherwise, this would be nasty but still, it is really annoying. The camera also goes ballistic at times enough to possibly give someone a fit.

The game should not have been released until these bugs were patched first. Also, I was unable to finish the last campaign mission because even after defeating everyone and closing all the doors, the troops still kept coming, and it just wasn’t clear how to finish that game

The AI

Oh boy, is the AI horrible. I can’t believe that this AI was produced by the same company that made Mordheim as the AI in this game is the worst I have ever seen.

Watching it is strange as it seems to do really random things but describing it is very hard to do without showing you, so I think I will add a video section to this part so you can see how bad the AI is for yourself.

Summary

In summary, this game has potential, but of all things, the AI has to be fixed, as, without a good AI, a solo run of this game just won’t work. I don’t know what happened here but bring back the developers who made Mordheim to fix this, as I can even deal with the game crashing every mission but not with the AI.

It just completely ruins the game.