Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUENecrosmith
A necromancer simulator. Assemble the dead using different body parts while upgrading your tower, combine the abilities of the different fantastic races to fight your way through the hordes of enemies and overrun the ’chosen ones’. To tell the truth, the dead are pretty, uhm, dumb.
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Community discussion
A pixel-art necromancer tower-defense/action roguelite by Alawar where you stitch together undead minions from body parts, send them out to destroy enemy lairs, and upgrade your tower to escape.
Necrosmith is a cheap (about $3) cult-ish indie that Steam players rate Very Positive (about 86% of roughly 5.4k reviews in the local Steam data), with the body-part monster-crafting hook as the near-universal draw. The main complaint is that once you build your army you have very little control: minion AI is weak, you can only directly steer one unit at a time, and the game leans on grind and difficulty spikes. Critics barely covered it: Metacritic has no critic score and only a 7.5 user score from 4 ratings, and no OpenCritic entry could be found. The Steam store page shows recent reviews slipping to Mostly Positive (about 76% on a small sample), and some recent negatives say it has not been updated in years, while a sequel, Necrosmith 2, exists and several reviewers say it fixes the first game's control problems. It is a full release (not early access).
What players praise
- The body-part assembly system: mixing limbs, cores and weapons into odd creatures (skeleton chickens with lasers, vampires, robots, dragons) is called addictive and funny
- Recipe discovery: valid combos are saved to a book, get cheaper in mana and gain bonus stats, and can be summoned with one click
- Sense of progression and learning across runs; the game speeds up and gets fun after some early upgrades
- Pixel-art style, dark humor and personality; compared by reviewers to Vampire Survivors and old Flash games
- Very cheap; reviewers say it is worth a few dollars, with roughly 10-30+ hours of play reported
- Large variety of unit types to build, which reviewers applaud
- Good for casual, low-stress 'throw parts together and see what happens' sessions
What players criticize
- Minion AI is poor: units wander out of the base area, into dangerous biomes, and fail to defend the tower
- Direct control is limited: only one creature at a time via WASD, and the control spell reportedly lasts only a few seconds before the camera snaps back with very sensitive scrolling
- Late-game balance: enemy lairs spawn swarms far stronger than your units, and the 15-minion cap makes that hard to overcome
- Boss/timer pressure combined with meta progression that is weak early and then near-mandatory (e.g. daily starting parts upgrade), so runs can feel walled
- Permanent upgrades can make completing the game harder according to one reviewer, and one says it takes at least 3 runs for a single upgrade
- Limited replayability and depth: short, no story, strategy reduces to picking which units to keep and casting spells
- Some players report launch crashes or black screens on old installs, and the map is not very interactive
Distinctive features
- Necromancer workshop fantasy: you build the army from harvested body parts rather than picking premade units
- Hybrid of tower defense, action roguelite, light strategy and factory/automation management
- Tower upgrades (assembly line, cat house, blueprints) are gathered by destroying enemy lairs, with the goal of building an escape from the world
- Recipe book that unlocks cheaper, stronger versions of discovered combos
Divided opinions
- Short length and low replayability: some call it fine value for $3, others call it too thin
- Meta progression: some find it a satisfying ramp, others say it swings from tangible to mandatory and can wreck a save
- Unit AI and autonomy: some enjoy the hands-off chaos, many consider it the main flaw
- Versus Necrosmith 2: several reviewers say the sequel is strictly better, while a few say the first is more forgiving than later entries
Repetition and friction
- Slow, grindy start before upgrades make the game 'even out'
- Micromanaging minions or spamming the control spell because the AI cannot be trusted
- Heavy RNG on parts and repetitive late-game loops
- Needing several runs per meta upgrade
- Some players say they do not understand how to win, and a few threads ask whether micromanagement is required
Hoped-for improvements
- Better AI and stronger tactical commands (defend area, ranged units keep distance, hold position without being defenseless)
- Make the 'control minion' effect last until cancelled, or allow finer control of more than one unit
- Auto-craft specific units when parts are available and auto-sell surplus parts for mana
- Rebalance late-game enemy lair spawns and the 15-unit cap, and smooth the jump in meta-upgrade value
- More interactivity and variety in the map and more content/replay value
- Clearer guidance on recipe discovery (a Steam thread asks how to intuit recipes)
Released July 13, 2022 on Windows only by Alawar (developer and publisher), priced at $2.99 with frequent deep discounts; it is a full release, not early access. Steam owner estimate is 500k to 1M (SteamSpy), though that figure is imprecise; the revenue estimate is Boxleiter-based and not audited. Launch-era reception was positive on Steam, and it has stayed around 84-86% positive. Recent negative reviews mention no updates for years and note an advertisement for Necrosmith 2 placed in the main game's hub, and some recent positive reviews recommend playing it before the sequel. Critic coverage found was essentially nil: Metacritic lists no critic reviews. Note that the Steam store page fetch showed about 1.9k reviews while the local data shows about 5.4k (likely English-only versus all-language counts, unverified). Web search was unavailable (search budget exhausted) and Reddit could not be fetched, so community detail relies on Steam reviews, Steam discussions and Metacritic user reviews.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (local file) ↗
- Steam app data: price, review totals, tags, SteamSpy owners, revenue estimate ↗
- Steam store page: recent vs all-time ratings, tags, description ↗
- Steam community discussion topics: launch problems, difficulty, recipe discovery questions ↗
- Metacritic: no critic score, user score 7.5 from 4 ratings ↗
- Metacritic user reviews: Vampire Survivors comparison, casual-session praise ↗
- OpenCritic search: no Necrosmith entry found ↗
- Estimated gross and net revenue (Boxleiter method) ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 2 (2024)
Necrosmith is a base-builder where you assemble undead monsters from collected parts and send them out to fight and gather more parts. The world expands as your monsters grow stronger, unlocking new biomes and base additions. He found it immersive and fun to explore, almost a guilty pleasure. The AI is poor, it gets repetitive, and it plays more like a campaign than a roguelite. He places it in a middling tier, which he calls mid B.
What the creator praises
- Immersive look and feel
- World seems to expand endlessly as monsters get stronger, unlocking new biomes
- Satisfying to build monsters from parts and see their different abilities
- Strong sense of adventure and exploration
- Permanent upgrades between runs let you expand faster and go further
Issues raised by the creator
- Monster AI is miserable and follows few commands well
- Units wander into enemy armies and die with no explanation or way to track them
- Very little control over what happens
- Gets repetitive and boring after a while
- Once all biomes and monsters are seen there is little left; feels like a campaign rather than a roguelite with new builds
Design observations
- Genre-blending: base-building with a monster-crafting army, loosely like a very basic Starcraft
- Roguelite meta-progression is framed as exploration and world expansion rather than build variety
