Necromunda: Underhive Wars

A tactics studio's second attempt at grim gang warfare

Rogue Factor built its reputation on Mordheim: City of the Damned, a cult tactics game set in Games Workshop's fantasy skirmish setting. Necromunda: Underhive Wars is the studio's return to that formula in Warhammer 40,000's Necromunda setting — the lawless, industrial Underhive beneath the hive cities, where rival gangs fight over territory, resources and honor in turn-based combat with real strategic ambition: limb-by-limb targeting, permanent injuries that carry between missions, and a gang-management layer that lets losses actually cost you fighters rather than resetting cleanly between battles.

Critics found real substance in those ideas. But the dominant story of every review from launch week wasn't the design — it was the state the game shipped in. Metacritic settled at 53 on PC (59 PS4, 64 Xbox One), and the phrase that recurs across outlets is close to identical: "erratic AI and far too many glaring technical issues." One of the most-upvoted Steam reviews, posted the day after launch, opens with over 600 hours logged in Mordheim as credentials before delivering its verdict: "it's been a pretty miserable experience so far in the sense that it's an alpha product," going on to describe enemy AI that got stuck on scenery, ran aimlessly, and generally failed to function as opposing tactical intelligence should.

What launch week actually looked like

The negative-review sample from September 2020 reads like a bug-tracker rather than a set of opinions. "I just watched an enemy walk past one of my gang members three times before stopping to attack. I just had the game CTD when I tried to go back to the main menu. I just had my save file corrupted," reads one representative review from launch day. Another, posted the same week and upvoted by hundreds of players, opens with a direct warning: "This store page is a trap," before explaining the reviewer bought the game expecting the successor to Mordheim it was marketed as and found instead a project that needed substantially more development time.

Save corruption is the specific complaint worth taking most seriously, because Underhive Wars' core design — permanent injuries and persistent gang progression across an entire campaign — depends on saves actually holding. A review from November 2020, two months after launch, describes losing 100 hours of progress to a lockup that corrupted the save file; a similar report surfaces again from a different player the following January. For a game whose whole pitch is that your gang's losses matter and carry forward, a save system that can't reliably hold that data is a failure at the design's own foundation, not an unrelated technical footnote.

Real, sustained patching — then silence

To Rogue Factor's credit, the response wasn't nothing. The studio shipped five major updates between launch and June 2021: an October 2020 patch, a November 2020 update the developers described as containing over a hundred individual improvements and fixes, a December 2020 patch bundled with the House Van Saar gang DLC, a February 2021 update alongside the House Cawdor DLC, and a final patch in June 2021 adding a new playable career. Several Steam reviews from that window specifically credit the studio for the effort — "the game is now in a much less buggy state," reads one review updated ahead of the first DLC's release — even while noting that some game-breaking issues, including the save-corruption problem, persisted through multiple patch cycles rather than being fully resolved.

Then, after that June 2021 update, support stopped. There has been no further patch, fix or content update in the five-plus years since. Whatever state the game was in by mid-2021 — improved from launch, but by multiple accounts still carrying real bugs — is permanently the state it's in today.

The multiplayer nobody plays

Underhive Wars shipped with online PvP and 4-player co-op as headline features, and Valve's global achievement data shows just how little of that survived contact with reality. Only 3.5% of players who've unlocked at least one achievement have ever played a single multiplayer match. Winning 50 multiplayer matches — the top multiplayer milestone tracked — sits at 0.3%. For all practical purposes, the multiplayer mode this game was built around no longer has a population, if it ever had a substantial one to begin with.

The single-player campaign fares only modestly better by completion terms: 83.2% of players who own an achievement have started the game, but that falls to 21.3% by story mission 5 and just 9.1% by mission 15 — a steep early drop-off consistent with a launch rocky enough to lose a large share of players before the story properly got going.

Verdict

Necromunda: Underhive Wars had a genuinely interesting tactical foundation and a studio that, for nine months, visibly tried to fix what launched broken. Neither of those things changes the practical reality for anyone considering it in 2026: a campaign that historically corrupted saves even after extensive patching, a multiplayer mode that Valve's own numbers say is essentially empty, and five-plus years of total silence from a developer that stopped supporting it in the middle of 2021. The ideas underneath are worth acknowledging — this genuinely wasn't a cynical cash-grab, and the post-launch effort was real while it lasted — but "real effort, then abandoned" is still abandoned, and that's the game you'd be buying today.