Necropolis: Brutal Edition

This adventure through a vast, randomly created dungeon is difficult and challenging, but updates to the gameplay have made this a challenge worth fighting through. Necropolis: Brutal Edition takes you and up to three other people into a strange lair to fight through hordes of monsters to figure out why you're there. Your skills will be pushed to the limit, as you'll have to parry and attack enemies (while balancing the stamina costs these actions take), craft items for health boosts, and avoid environmental traps in an attempt to get a bit farther. Of course, as a rogue-like, you're more than likely going to die repeatedly before you make some progress. But Necropolis does a really good job of ensuring that you can always get a bit farther by converting some of your gems and other stats at the end of a game into tokens, which can be used to unlock new codices that improve your stats and skills in various ways. It can also keep you interested by sometimes dropping random weapons with elemental effects or gear that provide new abilities. Many of these may come from fighting enemies, who will sometimes accidentally attack each other (because friendly fire is on for players and monsters alike), meaning a tactical player can get beasts to fight among themselves and can clean up the pieces later.

What's nice about the Brutal edition is that a number of fixes improved some of the gameplay bugs and flaws while enhancing the challenge. It's really nice to smash your way through a room of monsters as the Brute character, absorbing many blows that would crush a regular character. But don't expect to waltz your way through everything. New creatures like the Fire Djinn, and new attack behaviors for beasts, will still demand much of you as you explore the narrow hallways. While you may still get attacked from behind, it's not nearly as overwhelming as it used to be, which reduces the frustration of dungeon exploration. Unfortunately, while there were some attempts to improve some of the vague and unclear elements, some of these still don't make any sense. For example, the codex to lessen your stamina loss doesn't really have an impact on this key stat at all. This being said, the vast number of improvements that have been made through multiple patches makes Necropolis: Brutal Edition what the launch title should've been: a fun, challenging dungeon crawl that will keep you and your friends entertained for many hours.