Recent reviews by Vulcan Raven

IN SHORT:

- game looks and sounds really great (except for the voice acting, which is at times very OUF)
- the AI is the worst AI I have ever witnessed in a video game
- the game tends to crash a lot. Thankfully, the game autosaves with every character that starts to move, so you don’t lose progress. If you’re lucky…
- You have to finish the campaign to unlock hair and gasmask cosmetic options in the other mode. (W H Y ???)


So all in all, definitely don’t buy it yet, unless you really just care for the story or some Necromunda Vibes. Wait until they fix the AI and save yourself a lot of anger.


IN DETAIL:

***SPOILERS***



Let me start from the beginning…

So when I decided to buy this game I was way more intrigued by the “Make your own Gang and do randomized missions”-Mode. So naturally, that is what I instantly clicked when I first saw the menu screen. The game, of course, warned me, that I should first play through the campaign to get a grasp of the gameplay. “Sure thing, that makes sense I guess” I thought and started the campaign. And thus I got my first Introduction to Necromunda: Underhive Wars.

So the game starts off with a huge load of tutorials. I wish these were a little bit more in your face and not just some textbox on the top right corner of your screen. It happened multiple times during the whole campaign, that the textbox showed new stuff and it instantly vanished, just to get replaced by a tooltip that I’ve read a thousand times already. But besides that, I was into the vibe the game was setting up. Mission 1 was a pure movement and shooting tutorial. Mission 2 felt like the first actual Mission but was also still a tutorial. But after that it started to get rough. I had a couple of hiccups during Mission 3, because of vanishing tooltips explaining the classes. Other than that, the Mission was fairly doable. Mission 4 suddenly gives you an entirely different Gang and it was in this mission where I first started to notice the… “special” behavior of the AI.

Your goal was to storm a multi story building, defeat all the Banecatz and rescue a dude, that they’ve captured. The place was rigged to hell and back with traps, literally everywhere you stepped there was a trap. Now like I said, I am a big fan of Valkyria Chronicles in which you have a soldier class, the pioneer, which can spot mines. So if he’s near one, you’ll get a visual and audio cue, so you don’t run into them like a moron. In Necromunda its quite a bit different. You get NO visual or audio cue and you’re just expected to see the traps (which look like a small canister of gas) in between all the dimly lit rubble and the other scum that’s on the floors of the hive. When I was onto the final missions I still ran into every damn trap because they are so hard to see. So I thought to myself: “Maybe I should lay traps too.” And so I did.

Now, the weird thing is: The AI kept running up and down the stairs inside the building, jumping from roofs and all. So obviously I wanted to limit their movement by laying traps on the stairs. And suddenly from that point onward the AI avoided the stairs like the plague and just jumped out of the window. This happened quite a lot during the whole campaign. The AI just instantly knows where your traps are and they avoid it. So what’s the point? I guess it works against other players but there are several missions where you have “Lay X Traps” as an optional goal.

Onward to Mission 5. This mission can just buzz right off. It’s an arena match against a melee focused enemy gang. For some reason the developers thought it would be a good Idea to let them all start with melee weapons, while your gang has to get them from the battlefield or the corpses of your slain foes. The enemy leader is for some reason even on a second enemy team entirely, which means once he joins the battle there will be two enemies moving at the beginning of each turn. I failed the mission two times, they just overran me. Only when I started to camp with all of my guys and gals on the middle of the map (an around 1 meter high platform) I managed to cheese the AI into defeat. But it did not feel like an earned victory at all.
Mission 6 switches you back to the Banecatz and you have to raid a base. The mission was kind of ok, though AI hilarity made the run into their own traps.

Then, all of a sudden, you get to play as yet ANOTHER different gang, with new abilities and new weapons. Tutorials for that? Gone before you can read them. Though I have to say, Mission 7 was quite fun. It was a nice and simple take and hold mission, of course easier than expected because of the AI.

Mission 14, were almost at the end and boy did I rage at this. Not because it was hard, but because of the sheer incompetence of the AI. So what’s different this time? Easy: You have to storm a fortified gate that is filled to the brim with enemy gangers. Way more than you would normally control. So to “”””””””help””””””” you, the mission gives you some buddies. But here’s the catch: They’re controlled by the AI. At the beginning it was funny. When I had to restart the mission because they would just sit in their spawn, LITERALLY watch the paint dry on the wall and sometimes throw grenades in their own face my mood was as grim dark as the 41st Millennia. I yelled at my screen while the Melee AI-Teammate ran into a group of four enemies, ran past them, ran up to the second floor, jumped down into the group again and then cowered into a corner and ended his turn. And all of that without stopping ONCE to attack or do ANYTHING useful AT ALL. I don’t know how I got through this mission but somehow I did. And there it was. Mission 15, the final one.

At first, I was happy, because it was almost over. Then I noticed that the AI teammate was part of the mission again. I cried a little bit, then started to pay attention. The mission itself isn’t too hard. Lock enemy reinforcement routes, defeat bosses, press buttons. The usual. And it even went quite good, except for the usual AI behavior. Almost at the end, I really wanted to kill one of the two last guys. But I already clicked on “Fire” when I noticed that my dude, who was about to unload his entire mag, only had one shot left. So I went back to the menu, knowing that the game saved when I started to move my guy. And it did. However, THE ENTIRE MISSION PROGRESS WAS RESET. And I don’t just mean reset. It was reset AND IT DIDN’T TELL ME. It took quite a while to lock all the 11 doors and to kill off the last enemy gangers. And then after the reload SUDDENLY EVERY DOOR WAS OPEN AGAIN. Did they show up as unlocked on the map? NOPE. So I had to go to every door and check whether the lock reset itself. With three people left standing. With the AI not being able to kill the swarms of reinforcements that were swooping right the frick in. When I was done with the mission I was about five percent off of having a damn stroke. It was just a mess.

And then after all that we get to see what its all about. We get to see why the hair and gasmask customization was locked. Because you unlocked the hairstyles of the three gangleaders.

Sooooooo…

WHY. DID. YOU. HAVE. TO. LOCK. EVERY. OTHER. HAIRSTYLE. THEN??????

It’s not even that these were super secret. You see them in Mission effin ONE!
Honestly, I don’t know when I will try out the other mode, because that AI hassle has just blown all the fun out of my life in an instant. As I said above, don’t buy it yet. If you’re interested then wait until they fixed the worst of the bugs and glitches. There’s also a lot of stuff that I didn’t get into, like every corpse T-Posing and asserting dominance when you reload a mission. But this is pretty much the experience you will have when suffering through the campaign.
I hope you guys have a better time than I had.

Totally underrated game. Everyone who likes older games should play this game.