Necrosmith

Necrosmith's core idea is good enough that it's easy to see why over 4,800 people left a review for a game that costs less than a coffee. You're a necromancer holed up in a tower, and instead of recruiting an army the normal way, you build one -- literally, piece by piece, sewing whatever head, torso and pair of limbs you've scavenged onto a fresh corpse and sending the resulting creature out to fight. A spider's legs on a knight's torso moves and fights nothing like a bat's wings on the same frame, and working out which combinations actually punch above their weight is the game's real pleasure. It's a genuinely distinctive premise, and the store page's own dry self-deprecation -- "to tell the truth, the dead are pretty, uhm, dumb" -- turns out to be a surprisingly accurate preview of where the complaints end up.

A great toy, an uneven game

Where Necrosmith earns its Very Positive score is in the sheer novelty of assembling monsters and watching what happens. "A super fun incremental about a necromancer and his cat simply trying to get by," reads one representative positive review, and another calls it "one part creature builder, one part random chance machine" that works well as "a casual 'throw crap together and see what happens' game" to play while doing something else. That framing -- half-idle, half-toybox -- is doing a lot of work in explaining why the game's fans stick with it despite the rough edges: nobody seems to be recommending it for tight tactical depth, they're recommending it for the specific joy of the assembly step.

The trouble is that the game built around that assembly step is where the negative reviews concentrate almost entirely, and the complaints repeat with striking consistency across nearly four years of feedback. Once your minions are built, directing them in combat means controlling one at a time while the rest operate on AI reviewers describe as unhelpful at best. "You would have to control every single unit to the stars and back while also getting many other things done," reads one September 2025 review, and another puts it more bluntly: it's "less than ideal to say the least." A May 2025 review sums up the whole tension well: "Good idea destroyed by bad mechanics. You can only control one unit, which means, if the others are stupid it's a pain." That's not a complaint about difficulty -- several of the same reviewers are candid that they enjoyed the early hours a great deal -- it's a complaint that the moment-to-moment combat never quite catches up to how clever the creature-building step is.

The grind that wears the charm down

Layered on top of the AI frustration is a second, related pattern: a between-run upgrade economy several long-time players describe as repetitive well before the game is actually finished. "Very grindy, very frustrating," reads one review with over 700 hours logged; a March 2025 review is more specific, warning that the game "needed grinding before it got good" in a way that isn't obvious from the opening hours. Checked against the game's own achievement data, that complaint holds up under scrutiny -- while the earliest combat achievements sit above 80% completion, the achievements tied to fully upgrading your machines or successfully resurrecting the game's rarer unit types (Angel, Demon, Frankenstein-style hybrids) all sit between roughly 9% and 15%. That's a steep drop, and it lines up closely with what reviewers describe: an inviting, playful opening that a large share of the audience simply doesn't push through to the harder content on the other side of the grind.

A publisher that moved on

The most pointed criticism in the sample isn't about a specific mechanic at all -- it's about support. "Dev rushed 1.0 and then immediately went on to Necrosmith 2," reads a September 2024 review. "If you want this game, get Necrosmith 2 instead. I can't recommend a game that doesn't currently have dev support." Checked against Alawar's own Steam news feed for this game, that read is hard to dismiss: after 2022 and 2023 entries mostly limited to sale announcements, the March 2024 post announcing "Necrosmith 2 is out now!" is followed by a long stretch of news items promoting entirely different Alawar-published games rather than anything specific to fixing this one. Alawar publishes a wide slate of small titles, and using an older game's audience to cross-promote a new one isn't unusual for a publisher operating at that scale -- but it does mean players hitting Necrosmith's more serious bugs, including at least one reported case where a maxed-out blueprint upgrade can block story completion outright, shouldn't expect an active fix cycle at this point.

Final verdict

Necrosmith is a genuinely inventive, cheap, and frequently delightful little strategy game undercut by exactly the parts of the design that would have made it great rather than merely good: unit AI that fights against the player instead of for them, and a grind that sets in right around where the game should be opening up. It's easy to recommend at NZ$4.49 purely on the strength of its central idea, and hard to recommend without caveats once you're past the honeymoon period with your first few undead creations.

6.0 out of 10. Worth the low price for the creature-building hook alone, best enjoyed as a relaxed, half-idle toy rather than a tightly tuned tower-defense game -- and if the concept really grabs you, know going in that Necrosmith 2 exists and appears to be where the studio's ongoing attention actually is.