Necroking

I wish I could recommend this game. It has some very nice artwork and ideas going on, and for 2 bucks on sale it's dirt cheap. Unfortunately this feels like it was developed by a team that was, to put it bluntly, very good at making a game but not at designing a game. If I had to boil the disappointment down to a single issue, I think it's that your choices don't matter. You technically use resources to walk around the map and upgrade your character, but you're showered with so many of them that they might as well just not have been in the game. You can customize your deck for each battle, but 9 out of 10 battles are fought with the exact same deck using the exact same strategy. There's a bunch of diffferent units to gather and develop, but there's such an abundance of units that you're free to quickly build the same, optimized team each time. There were very few occasions where I specifically felt like I was doing something right or wrong. I died to the final boss on my first run (because I'm a moron) and realized trying again was going to be a 5-hour slog that I just wasn't willing to go through. There was potential for a good game here. This just should have been playtested more during development to see if it was actually fun. I do hope they have a go at the concept again in the future.

I got this game for two bucks and for two bucks its worth about maybe 5 hours. Tried a couple different strategies but overall the pacing feels off. Maybe I'm missing something but for a deckbuilder a lot of the cards just aren't worth using. It feels optimal to have like 10 cards in your deck so your draw is consistent--it allowed me to clear the whole map without much trouble; which is a big problem for me. I never felt the need to change my strategy or composition, so now I have hundreds of skeleton cards that I will never use. The other between-battle upgrades are slow to upgrade and don't do much, leading to a map that feels empty. Each battle feels basically the same. There are some cool locations that give you powerful cards and shake up the combat slightly, but even then I never shifted my deck comp. If I could change one thing about this game I would either make the map smaller or go to a node system. You can spend hours taking every fight on the map and then fight the boss with the same deck and the fight will basically be the same. Maybe its different on the higher difficulties but it's not gonna hold my attention to get there. Edit: Formatting. TLDR: Worth for $2, but won't hold your attention for very long. Overall I'd give it a 6/10.

A very easy, repetitive short game. It took me a little over 2 hours to finish the game, in which I never lost a battle or hp. There are very few bosses in the game with unique mechanics, which barely changed my strategy if at all. There are multiple areas you progress through, each one deleting your inventory of cards and deck upgrades, changing it back to default. The only thing kept between areas is your researched cards, which aren't even needed and many are not very useful. There is a "story" but its just text in between swapping areas. The game is infinitely replayabl but it gets boring pretty quickly. If you want a quick, cheap game where you don't have to use much of your brain, you could try this out. (it does not get content updates but does get more point shop items..)

It is very boring and repetitive. If you expect a decent deck building game with summons look further.

bought this thinking i needed a brain to play it, i half expected to actually control an army of skeletons in a cool way, but the football field format felt really boring. like i understand why you did it. its unique as an auto battler. what i would change is more combat and like idk more troops on screen to give us something to look at. its really boring. when i won my first battle i felt absolutely no chemicals in my brain, walked over a cemetery, USED zero of its cards to beat some bosses. like geez.

The battles require you to drag and drop cards a lot. There comes a time when you're just too lazy to restart a battle and make a thousand repetitive clicks all over again. If the battles were automated, the game would be much more enjoyable.

The negative reviews should be ignored. This game is worth $2, and this game is worth $5. Take a deep breath and find your bones.

cool art style but bad localization and the gameplay isnt engaging or rewarding

could be a really fun game but suffers desperatly from a lack of content not many unit types almost all actions are one use not many map events not many fight mechanics, its just too simple unfortunatley, there is however fun to be had playing it

[h3] Necroking is a short and charming puzzle game with a lot of love put into it, that nonetheless lacks [i] a number of things [/i]. 2.5/5 [/h3] [i] On my scale, a 2.5 game deserves a mixed rating. If it is graded 2.5 and recommended, it leans more towards being good, satisfying, and fun, but with severe limitations that you should consider before committing to a purchase. The recommendation is, therefore, heavily conditional on your preferences as a player. [/i] Necroking is short and sweet, ranging between 4-8 hours from start to finish depending on how intensively (unnecessarily) you explore. Overall, it is a cool little puzzle game that has a satisfying core gameplay loop with some details that are nice touches. The gameplay itself has the overworld and battle encounters. In the overworld you explore and walk on different tiles to collect resources and build your deck, and you get to choose when and where to enter combat. When you enter combat, you draw cards, and you have to play them balancing souls (number of units on the board) and mana (cost of the cards you want to play). The combat arena is divided into 4 quadrants, and certain cards can only be played in certain zones. It’s quite satisfying to use units and watch them do their thing. You can change your deck at will and constantly experiment with different units and combinations to see what type of playstyle you like the best. Personally, my favorite elements of the game are the small details that went into the game from a design perspective. The sprite work is charming, each biome has its own theme, the bosses are cool and some can be challenging if you wander into them without optimizing your deck, and some of the cards really fun to use (I loved Calvary spam). Overall, the game is $5 and you get a few hours of enjoyment out of it. Is it worth it? Ehh… it’s kind of a hard sell. The game design is very good, but the [i] gameplay [/i] does not have the same level of thought put into it. Firstly, there is no tutorial. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what the point of most of the overworld things were, and frankly the overworld map is too cluttered and generous with resources. It takes a while to understand what the point of certain things are and even that certain things exist. It would’ve been very helpful to even have a screen that just says “here are the basic mechanics and overall objective of the game” that would have been very helpful for structuring the way I played the game. For example, I was initially really confused that we kept returning to the start of the map with my progress reset each time I beat the king because it just wasn’t properly telegraphed. Secondly, the game wants to have roguelike and exploration elements, but they clash. I played the game on a higher difficulty and it never felt like I was ever at risk of losing. The game gives you so many opportunities to find resources in the overworld that you could just hop from resource to resource and only fight bosses and win. So if you explore too much the game loses any challenge it could have, and if you don’t explore enough then it’s just not really fun. This wouldn’t be as big a problem if you were actually punished for running away. If you flee an encounter, you just lose part of your deck, which functionally doesn’t matter at all unless you’re using rare units (and those aren’t even necessary or important to use). You should take damage or something to discourage fleeing, but because you can just flee and patch up the holes in your deck from the hundreds of cards you would collect in the overworld, there are no stakes to make battle feel dangerous. You can even flee from the boses with no consequences and just reset the fight, which is somewhat nonsensical for any game with “roguelike/roguelite” elements. One you beat the game you unlock a mode where you lose your entire deck after each battle, but that just exacerbates the abundance of resources in the overworld problem since you just… almost never actually [i] have [/i] to fight. Thirdly, the vast majority of cards serve as deck bloat and have no obvious use case. The more effective strategy is to just spam something that works over and over again. A sweet spot for the number of cards in the deck seems to be around 10-15, more than that and you’re just trolling yourself. I am cautiously giving this a recommended rating, mainly because I really like the visual and audio design and the core gameplay loop does end up being fun if you just take it for what it is. Buy on sale, $2.50 or below is worth it.

For $5 I got a pretty strait forward Strategy game that lasted me 7.5 hours. I call that a good trade.

Fun and thematically charming deckbuilder. Really great pickup for the price, especially discounted

It's a fun auto battler game using a deck of cards to randomize the units you get with a decent amount of strategy. It doesn't have a ton of unit variety and fights can be fairly similar until you get to boss battles. I still found it to be quite fun and played through the entire game. I think it's well worth the price of 5$ and I got it on sale for 2$.

I was charmed by pixel graphic but gameplay wasn't challenging for me. I also found an problem were one enemy was blocked out of the battle areas and my horse units were stacking to 100 points so it seems that I found a bug which didn't let me win and leave the fight. Overall game is fun to play but to easy and with a very little amount of issues.

I got it on a sale, and I love what they're going for! Yet after 5 hours it was painfully the same, but I stayed with it, honestly nothing really changes. I WANNA recommend this and I know A LOT of work has been put into this game, but as a consumer rather than a dev. This sadly is a no. (4/10) Watch out for fake reviews!

Fun game, worth it card deck building game!

10 hours of neat strategy gameplay for 2 bucks, cant beat it

Its a big "meh," for me. Got it on sale for a dollar, so I'm fine with the price. But it's just not drawing me in. It's not bad -- just Feels a bit done before, and really not super engaging. But even if it's not on sale its super cheap, and if you like rouge games with card collecting. Might as well try it. You may like it more than me. Edit, changed from thumbs up to down. As I dont think I will ever pick this up again, and I only got two hours out of it.

just not that fun, too limited and grind-y not interesting, creative or fun

Good game. Would never have seen it without the sale, but glad I did,

4/10 Repetitive Gameplay.

Very good game for it's price range.

Can't imagine a better thing than skeleton kinghts.

Decent. But lacking.

horrible game

very good

very good

Best £4 I've spent in a while.

Neat deckbuilder / autobattler

horse go brrrr