Necromunda: Underhive Wars Review Summary

Stunning visuals and atmosphere with rich gang customization and excellent map design, but marred by broken AI, persistent bugs, and limited content.

Stunning visuals and atmosphere: Multiple clusters highlight the game's impressive graphics, art style, and atmosphere, which are praised for their quality and fitting the Warhammer 40K theme.

Rich gang customization: Players greatly enjoy the extensive customization for gangs and characters, including visual appearance, progression, and mechanical depth. The system allows for unique personalization and long-term engagement.

Excellent map design: Maps are lauded for their visual diversity, verticality, quality, and quantity, along with a highly praised tactical map tool that is easy to navigate.

Fun and solid concept: The core concept is praised as solid and fun, with many players finding the game enjoyable and engaging overall.

Immersive audio design: Sound design, music, and atmospheric audio are praised for their quality, with specific mentions of the bolter sounds and soundtrack.

AI is severely broken and unengaging: Players overwhelmingly report that the AI is dysfunctional, often ignoring objectives, running in circles, getting stuck on terrain, or making pointless movements. The AI fails to provide a meaningful challenge, even on higher difficulty settings, which undermines the tactical gameplay and makes matches feel tedious.

Persistent bugs and crashes ruin the experience: The game suffers from a high number of bugs, including crashes (sometimes 50% of the time), save corruption that wipes progress, and persistent game-breaking issues in campaigns. Even minor graphical glitches and odd moments detract from the experience.

Slow pacing with forced AI turn watching: Gameplay is slowed down by lengthy AI turns that cannot be fast-forwarded, forcing players to watch every action, even for distant units. Combined with the overall deliberate pacing, matches feel like a significant time commitment with little payoff.

Limited base game content and gang variety: The base game offers only three playable gangs at launch, far fewer than the six expected from the tabletop version. Players feel this is a deliberate design to encourage DLC purchases, and the gangs lack meaningful distinctiveness in their playstyles.

Clunky and unintuitive controls and UI: Controls are described as unintuitive, clunky, and prone to misclicks, while the UI adds to the frustration with poor explanations of abilities. This makes basic actions and strategic planning unnecessarily difficult, especially for new players.

Turn-based tactical Necromunda game: It is a turn-based tactical game set in the Warhammer 40k Necromunda universe, featuring third-person perspective and mechanics like overwatch and ambush. It combines squad tactics with gang management and progression.

Rich customization options: The game offers extensive customization for gangs and characters, including appearance options like face, skin, hairstyles, scars, and outfit, as well as equipment skins, skills, classes, and weapons. This allows deep personalization of the player's team.

Multiple game modes: The game includes a story campaign with over 15 missions, an operations campaign mode, and multiplayer skirmishes. Additional modes like training, bounty fight, and free play allow full gang creation after the campaign.

Vertical map design: Maps are varied with strong verticality, featuring multiple floors, ziplines, and tactical drop points. This adds strategic depth to positioning and movement.

Five fighters per gang: Squads are limited to up to 5 fighters per gang in a mission, and up to 4 gangs can participate in the same battle. This creates compact, tactical engagements focused on small team management.

Frequent game crashes and instability: Players report that the game crashes frequently, including during missions, cutscenes, and AI turns. Some users note persistent crashes even after patches, with daily occurrences and loss of progress.

Graphics glitches and visual bugs: Users report graphics glitches, low-fidelity textures, and visual bugs in cutscenes and missions. Specific issues include texture pop-in, jittering cameras, and stuck terrain views.

Multiplayer crashes and desktop exits: Crashes to desktop occur during multiplayer matches, including during AI turns. This issue remains largely unresolved, affecting online play stability.

Mixed optimization and performance: Mixed opinions on performance: some call optimization passable or good, while others note stutters in campaign cutscenes and performance issues in specific missions.

Forced closures due to glitches: Players occasionally need to force close the game due to unresponsive glitches, crashes, or freezes, indicating reliability issues.

Do not buy at any price: A strong sentiment among reviewers is to avoid buying the game entirely, even at deep discounts like 90% off. Many cite the game being broken or a waste of time and money.

For Warhammer and Necromunda fans: The game is recommended primarily for fans of Warhammer 40k, Necromunda, or Mordheim, particularly those who enjoy turn-based strategy. This suggests the game appeals strongly to a niche audience.

Value only on sale: Multiple reviews suggest the game is only worth purchasing when on sale, with some specifying a price point like $10 or less. This indicates that the game may not offer enough value at full price.

Play Mordheim instead: Several reviewers advise playing Mordheim: City of the Damned instead of this game, indicating that Mordheim provides a better experience. This suggests the game is seen as inferior to a similar title.

Fun with friends on sale: Some reviews found the game fun when played with friends, suggesting a social experience can enhance enjoyment. It is recommended to buy cheap copies for a group.

Community fair range: $5.00 - $15.00.

Game completion: 27.5h.

Story completion: 17.5h.

Session length: 1.0h.

Necromunda: Underhive Wars suffers from a poor tutorial and steep learning curve that delays fun, but the gang customization and tactical depth can become engaging once mastered; repetitive missions and weak AI limit long-term appeal.

Friction: poor tutorial that doesn't explain mechanics well; steep learning curve; bugs and crashes; clunky user interface; weak AI that provides no challenge; repetitive mission design and long tutorial/story mode (≈15 hours).

Unlock drivers: understanding core mechanics and UI; completing the story campaign (tutorial); customizing and progressing a personal gang; playing cooperatively with friends.

Necromunda Devotee: Focuses on gang customization and immersion in the Necromunda setting; engages with single-player operations and story campaign despite frustrations. Motivation: Experiencing the authentic Necromunda atmosphere and building personalized gangs. Stance: deep sale.

Competitive PvP Enthusiast: Dedicated to PvP; optimizes gang builds for competitive play and values balanced mechanics; engages with the community for matches. Motivation: Competitive play and building a lasting multiplayer community. Stance: no buy.

Sandbox Tactician: Plays single-player operations extensively; focuses on gang progression, skill customization, and sandbox replayability; often ignores or avoids the flawed story campaign. Motivation: Creating and developing custom gangs in a persistent sandbox environment. Stance: sale.

Monetization: The user feedback primarily targets perceived 'cash grab' DLC practices—specifically, releasing paid gang packs before fixing bugs and selling content that feels cut from the base game. However, all monetization discussed is traditional DLC/expansions; there is no indication of microtransactions, pay-to-win mechanics, or in-game purchases. Under the scoring rules, such complaints about traditional DLC cannot push the score above 20. Therefore, the score is 18, reflecting frustration with packaging but acknowledging the absence of predatory real-money monetization systems.

Copy for coverage: Some reviews indicate the copy was provided for coverage purposes, which could be noted for context but does not reflect unsolicited player sentiment.