Recent reviews by Bad Decision Dino

Crashes every 2nd turn. 2K is obviously aware of instability issues, but I would not purchase until you're 100% sure it is 100% stable on your system.

I've followed and played for a couple of updates, and I think it's clear now that Necronator isn't quite meaty enough to recommend. It's okay, but not a lot more.

N: DW is a genre mashup of minion lane battle and "roguelite deckbuilder." It's abundantly clear that the deckbuilder half is HEAVILY Slay the Spire derivative; you follow the exact same formula of moving up through a map tree of encounters that include a battle, a shop, a random event, and a miniboss/boss at the end. You pick a character archetype and get a starting deck that you can sculpt with card buys, pickups, and upgrades. So far so cloned, but at least it's a solid base.

Where Necronator falls flat is the actual battles. They're a curious mix of real-time micromanagement and a deckbuilder; you have Mana that ticks up every second rather than a fixed actions-per-turn and cast AoE spells or spawn units whenever you want with your cards. That means the gameplay interest is in deciding when and where to deploy your cards, and trying to make smart plays like saving mana for a few seconds to drop a unit and a spell at the same time for better effect. Unfortunately, you don't end up doing that kind of engaging thinking much.

There's a few types of battle mode, including "just survive for a fixed timer" and "beat a mega-mob that slowly doomcrawls down one lane," but the actual approach you take doesn't change much - if at all. You can get relics and bonuses and upgrade cards between battles through events and shops, but essentially - if you're at all familiar with deckbuilders, you're going to find a combo strat in short order and then every battle encounter is about surviving the 30s or so until your steamroller deck gets rolling.

I found myself ignoring the map entirely just trying to micro my hand in most runs. Every battle has some tipping point, usually very early, where you have already locked in to the combo of your doom-engine deck and have nothing to do but just repeat the same pattern of cards for the next 5 minutes mindlessly. No decisions to make, no real challenge, but you're locked into doing the busywork by the real-time gameplay. A lot of the relics reduce Mana cost or cooldowns; it means you can cast cards faster, but that's really just more micro to achieve the same combo of cards.

It's not un-fun, it's not poorly built, but it doesn't have the gameplay interest in the actual battles to be engaging long-term. It's graphically and engine-wise a nice package. I didn't run into any serious bugs, the writing is sharp and doesn't overstay it's welcome, the art is solid - in particular the card art is well done, with very clear information. The overworld art just feels like you're playing off-brand Slay the Spire, but there's nothing wrong with it. The battle mode 3d is really appealing to me, but the spell-casting and unit-placement can be awkward due to your units blocking placement and camera movement and I never used the full-3d rotation - it's much less disorienting to just set your base as the bottom and never move the camera.

Overall, I don't think it's worth more than a run or two as each character. The gameplay formula isn't interesting enough to keep me engaged even with good presentation.