Info about Necromunda: Underhive Wars:

Official game description:
  
Deep below the nightmarish, polluted hive cities of Necromunda, in the twisted, vertiginous, dark tunnels of the Underhive, rival gangs fight to the bitter end for personal power, wealth, survival and the honour of their Houses. Only the strongest survive.  
Lead, customize, and grow your gangs of Escher, Goliath, and Orlock. Specialize each member and send them to battle in hazardous dystopian environments. Exploit the terrain in tactical gunfights: climb raised walkways to take advantage, set traps, and ambush foes to force them into bloody melee engagements.  
Learn new skills, loot equipment and bring your evolved gang to 4-player online gang fights.  
*   Lead and evolve your gangs in this compelling tactical-RPG  
*   Follow a rich narrative campaign in the Underhive  
*   Engage in immersive and persistent game modes  
*   First video game adaptation from mythical tabletop game Necromunda, the most famous Hive World of Warhammer 40,000  
*   Play solo or join thrilling 4-way online gang fights

Release date: Sep 7, 2020

Categories: Tactical RPG, Turn-based Combat, Squad Management, Character Progression, Customization, Online Multiplayer, Single-player Story, Board Game Adaptation

Feature scans:
- MTX: score 18; verdict: Fair with Grudging DLC; summary: 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.

- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price:
  - Community fair range: $5.00 - $15.00
  - Reasoning: The community consistently advises against purchasing the game at its current base price of $19.99, instead recommending waiting for a sale. Multiple reviews explicitly cite acceptable price points between $5 and $15. For example, one review states '$10 or less', another '$15 or less', and a third suggests $5 as acceptable. Even a review noting a $7 NZD purchase (roughly $4.30 USD) considers it good value. The consensus indicates that the fair base-game price is well below the listed price, clustered in the $5–$15 range.
- Playtime Metrics:
  - Game completion: 27.5h
  - Story completion: 17.5h
  - Session length: 1.0h
  - Endgame: N/A
  - Reasoning: Game completion is estimated at 20-35 hours based on a player's statement about total playtime to finish. Story/campaign completion is approximately 15 hours from a review describing the main mission string, and also 15-20 hours from another review of the campaign. Session length is derived from multiple mentions of missions taking about an hour each, suggesting a typical play session. Endgame evidence is weak (only one reviewer's 25 hours in gang operations, but not clearly typical), so null is returned.
- Time-to-fun:
  - Summary: 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.
  - Stance: Clicks after
  - Anchor: After completing the story campaign (extended tutorial)
  - Time to anchor: N/A
  - 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
  - Conditions: solo play with patience to learn mechanics; co-op with friends for shared fun; engagement with gang customization and progression system; tolerance for repetitive mission templates; acceptance of board-game-like pacing
- Player Archetypes:
  - Necromunda Devotee (deep sale)
    - Motivation: Experiencing the authentic Necromunda atmosphere and building personalized gangs.
    - Playstyle: Focuses on gang customization and immersion in the Necromunda setting; engages with single-player operations and story campaign despite frustrations.
    - Experience: familiar
    - Purchase stance: deep sale
    - Labels: Necromunda fan; tabletop gamer; Warhammer 40K enthusiast
    - Reference games: Necromunda (tabletop); Mordheim: City of the Damned
  - Competitive PvP Enthusiast (no buy)
    - Motivation: Competitive play and building a lasting multiplayer community.
    - Playstyle: Dedicated to PvP; optimizes gang builds for competitive play and values balanced mechanics; engages with the community for matches.
    - Experience: veteran
    - Purchase stance: no buy
    - Labels: PvP player; competitive gamer; community member
    - Reference games: Mordheim: City of the Damned (PvP); Other tactical PvP games
  - Sandbox Tactician (sale)
    - Motivation: Creating and developing custom gangs in a persistent sandbox environment.
    - Playstyle: Plays single-player operations extensively; focuses on gang progression, skill customization, and sandbox replayability; often ignores or avoids the flawed story campaign.
    - Experience: mixed
    - Purchase stance: sale
    - Labels: casual tactician; sandbox player; single-player gamer
    - Reference games: XCOM; Mordheim: City of the Damned
  - Mordheim Veteran (buy)
    - Motivation: Continuing the tactical gameplay experience from Mordheim with updated mechanics.
    - Playstyle: Critically compares the game to Mordheim; focuses on tactical combat mechanics and progression systems; notices refinements but also omissions like campaign-specific missions.
    - Experience: veteran
    - Purchase stance: buy
    - Labels: Mordheim player; Rogue Factor fan; tactical strategy veteran
    - Reference games: Mordheim: City of the Damned


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Stunning visuals and atmosphere (weight 0.44): 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 (weight 0.33): 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 (weight 0.29): 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 (weight 0.26): The core concept is praised as solid and fun, with many players finding the game enjoyable and engaging overall.
- Immersive audio design (weight 0.22): Sound design, music, and atmospheric audio are praised for their quality, with specific mentions of the bolter sounds and soundtrack.
- Improved Mordheim experience (weight 0.19): The game is compared favorably to Mordheim, offering a similar experience with refinements and more enjoyable gameplay.
- Balanced combat mechanics (weight 0.11): Players find a good balance between ranged and melee combat, as well as different playstyles, allowing for varied tactical approaches.
- Engaging Operations mode (weight 0.08): The Operations mode, which focuses on building and leveling a gang, is particularly praised for being highly enjoyable and addictive.
- Solid tactical gameplay (weight 0.08): The game is recognized as a good tactical title, providing solid tactical gameplay that appeals to strategy fans.
- Nice cutscenes (weight 0.08): Cutscenes are noted for their quality and how well they integrate into the game, enhancing the overall experience.
- Recognized potential (weight 0.08): Players recognize the game's potential, noting that it could be even better with further development or refinement.
- Decent story (weight 0.07): The story is considered decent or good, earning a moderate rating and providing a satisfactory narrative experience.
- Good value on sale (weight 0.07): Some players find the game worth purchasing when on sale, suggesting it provides good value at a lower price point.

Common complaints:
- AI is severely broken and unengaging (weight 0.96): 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 (weight 0.39): 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 (weight 0.27): 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 (weight 0.26): 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 (weight 0.2): 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.
- Abandonment by developers in favor of DLC (weight 0.2): Players feel the developers have all but abandoned the game, focusing on releasing paid DLC instead of fixing fundamental issues. This perception of greed and incompetence has eroded trust and contributed to the negative sentiment.
- Story mode is boring and lacks depth (weight 0.15): The story mode is heavily criticized as boring, poorly designed, and lacking features like customization and character screens during combat. Players find it more annoying than engaging, with some quitting around mission 10.
- Unfinished feel comparable to early access (weight 0.13): The game feels unpolished and incomplete, akin to an early access title, with many mechanics feeling raw. This lack of refinement is considered unacceptable for a full-priced release.
- Save corruption leads to total progress loss (weight 0.13): Save corruption is a recurring issue that can wipe out all progress, particularly in ironman campaigns. This discourages investment in long play sessions, as the risk of losing data is high.
- Campaign strips strategic management features (weight 0.12): The campaign mode removes many gang management mechanics and forces a fixed gang, stripping away a key aspect of the game. Combined with poorly designed gang campaigns, this reduces the strategic depth and replayability.
- Multiplayer unstable with frequent crashes (weight 0.12): Multiplayer sessions are plagued by frequent crashes and instability, making cooperative or competitive play unreliable. This further reduces the already limited multiplayer appeal.
- Dead multiplayer with missing campaign mode (weight 0.12): Multiplayer is nearly dead, with few players and no campaign mode, making it difficult to find matches. This lack of active community support undermines the game's longevity.
- Customization locked behind disliked story mode (weight 0.11): Important customization options are locked behind finishing the boring story mode, and the future DLC policy is transparently concerning. Players resent being forced into content they dislike to unlock features.
- Repetitive mission design with little variety (weight 0.1): Missions lack variety and mostly devolve into simple deathmatches that can be won by killing all enemies. This repetitiveness makes the gameplay feel shallow and uninspired over time.
- Inferior to predecessor Mordheim (weight 0.1): Comparisons to the older game Mordheim: City of the Damned are unfavorable, with players stating that this game is jankier and less polished. This disappointment is especially strong for fans of the previous title.
- Steep learning curve with poor communication (weight 0.07): The game has a steep learning curve with poor explanations for its systems, making it inaccessible to newcomers. Players must invest extra time to understand mechanics that should be better taught.
- Unclear tutorial hinders learning (weight 0.07): The tutorial is unclear and leaves players confused about basic mechanics, causing some to get stuck early on. Better onboarding is needed to help new players understand the game.

Gameplay feedback:
- Turn-based tactical Necromunda game (weight 0.47): 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 (weight 0.37): 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 (weight 0.21): 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 (weight 0.18): 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 (weight 0.15): 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.
- Three gangs at launch (weight 0.14): At launch, there are only 3 playable gangs: Escher, Goliath, and Orlock. This limited roster may be a point of criticism for players seeking variety.
- Six character classes (weight 0.13): There are 6 character classes with unique abilities, and the game features skills, abilities, experience, levels, equipment, and weapons. Classes and skills influence tactical options.
- Great atmosphere and art (weight 0.13): The game captures the Warhammer 40k atmosphere well, with great music, design, and art style fidelity. It is praised for its immersive grim-dark setting.
- Four-player multiplayer (weight 0.12): Matches can involve up to 4 parties, including human or AI opponents, with options for 2v2, 1v3, or free-for-all battles. Some maps allow 4-way conflicts.
- Similar to Mordheim (weight 0.1): Several players compare the game to Mordheim: City of the Damned, noting similarities in gameplay and structure. This suggests it appeals to fans of that title.
- No campaign customization (weight 0.08): During the campaign, players are forced to use a fixed gang without customization options, which limits freedom. This has been noted as a negative aspect.
- Faithful tabletop adaptation (weight 0.07): It is considered a faithful adaptation of the Necromunda tabletop game mechanics, preserving the core strategic and gang-management elements. This appeals to tabletop fans.
- Separate AP and MP system (weight 0.07): The game uses separate action points (AP) and movement points (MP) systems, allowing high mobility. Players can move and act independently within a turn.

Performance notes:
- Frequent game crashes and instability (weight 0.43): 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 (weight 0.16): 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 (weight 0.15): Crashes to desktop occur during multiplayer matches, including during AI turns. This issue remains largely unresolved, affecting online play stability.
- Mixed optimization and performance (weight 0.12): 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 (weight 0.04): Players occasionally need to force close the game due to unresponsive glitches, crashes, or freezes, indicating reliability issues.

Recommendations:
- Do not buy at any price (weight 0.37): 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 (weight 0.36): 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 (weight 0.22): 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 (weight 0.14): 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 (weight 0.08): 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.
- Mixed advice for tabletop fans (weight 0.08): A few reviews suggest buying the game only if you liked Mordheim PC game or Necromunda tabletop, while others recommend buying the tabletop version instead. This reflects mixed advice for fans of the source material.
- Recommended despite flaws (weight 0.07): A minority of reviews gave a positive recommendation despite acknowledging flaws, indicating that some players found enjoyment overall. This suggests the game has redeeming qualities for tolerant players.

Other player notes:
- Copy for coverage (weight 0.04): Some reviews indicate the copy was provided for coverage purposes, which could be noted for context but does not reflect unsolicited player sentiment.

Emotions:
- Frustration (weight 0.27): Players consistently report frustration with poor AI that ignores objectives, gets stuck on terrain, and makes nonsensical moves. Repetitive mission design, a lack of proper tutorials, and technical issues like crashes and clunky UI further compound the negative experience.
- Disappointment (weight 0.19): Players are disappointed by the game's failure to live up to the source material, citing weak AI, limited multiplayer operations, and a lack of mission variety. The fixed campaign with no gang customization and a shallow story is a major letdown, especially compared to similar titles like XCOM and Mordheim.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.12): Satisfaction comes from the deep class system, gang management, and engaging action point mechanics. The atmospheric setting and extensive cosmetic customization are highlights, and despite bugs, the core gameplay loop of character progression and exploration is enjoyable.
- Annoyance (weight 0.12): Annoyance stems from persistent bugs such as AI pathfinding issues and crashes, as well as forced lengthy tutorial missions and turn bloat. Unfitting animations and mechanics like extraction points blocked by destructible terrain add to the irritation.
- Anger (weight 0.05): Anger is directed at the developers for seemingly abandoning a broken game, with bugs that prevent mission completion and require forfeits. The poor adaptation of the beloved tabletop game intensifies this negative emotional response.
- Appreciation (weight 0.03): Appreciation is expressed for well-implemented mechanics like the movement and action point system, including free movement and dual-wielding equipment. The deep 40k setting and cooperative play are also praised.
- Excitement (weight 0.03): Excitement arises from the grand scale and depth of the 40k hive world narrative, the compelling story, and the immersive multiplayer 4-way battles. The sense of gangers rising and falling over time adds to the anticipation.
- Irritation (weight 0.02): Irritation results from customization being locked behind a tedious story campaign, as well as janky animations, missing damage displays, and the absence of a combat log.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.01): Enjoyment is derived from the feeling that, after several hours of play, the game surpasses similar titles like Mordheim in overall quality and fun.
- Slight satisfaction (weight 0.01): Slight satisfaction is expressed by players who do not regret their purchase despite acknowledging the game's various issues.
- Interest (weight 0.01): Interest is sparked by the tactical complexity, atmospheric world-building, and wide range of customization options available to players.
- Mild disappointment (weight 0.01): Mild disappointment is noted due to the AI still exhibiting frequent 'senior moments,' or poor decision-making, despite updates.
- Concern (weight 0.01): Concern is raised about the low multiplayer population, which threatens the game's long-term viability and matchmaking possibilities.
- Hope (weight 0.01): Hope persists among players who see significant potential in the game, believing it could become great with further improvements and updates.
- Resentment (weight 0.01): Resentment is felt toward the locking of customization options behind a poorly designed campaign, limiting player choice and enjoyment.
- Pleasure (weight 0.01): Pleasure is derived from the game's high-quality graphics and well-crafted level design, which enhance the visual experience.
- Dissatisfaction (weight 0.01): Dissatisfaction arises from the launch roster of only three playable gangs, which are perceived to have only minor differences, leaving the game feeling lacking in content.
- Disgust (weight 0.01): Disgust is triggered by the camera quake effect, which causes severe screen vibration and detracts from the gameplay experience.
- Rage (weight 0.01): Rage is provoked by in-game mechanics where a heavy weapon character dies instantly on spawn without explanation, and forfeiting a mission strips all gang members of their weapons.
- Amazement (weight 0.01): Amazement is felt at the unbelievably detailed maps, including stunning interiors, which showcase impressive design and world-building.}