Developer 10tons Ltd. is probably most well-known for their extensive library of excellent top-down shooters, and I am for sure a fan of pretty much all of those, but when it comes down to picking my all-time favorite game from them that honor has to go to Undead Horde. Ok, mayyybe Dysmantle would actually take that crown, but I can’t deny just how much fun I had with Undead Horde when it launched for mobile back in 2019. It’s an action RPG where you play as a Necromancer who can raise the dead and command them to do your bidding for you in a war against the living. It’s part action game as you can hack and slash your way through enemies, and part strategy game as you direct your undead horde into battles in a very lightweight real-time strategy way. The mashup of genres actually works very well together, and we picked Undead Horde as our Game of the Week when it hit mobile a few years back.

Now this week 10tons is finally lifting the lid off of an ambitious sequel titled Undead Horde 2: Necropolis. The basic premise is the same but there are three major areas where Undead Horde 2 expands upon the original. First, and possibly most exciting, is that you aren’t limited to reanimating the same enemy type that you just defeated. There’s now something called a “Raise Wheel" that lets you decide what class of undead you’d like to raise and add to your army. This opens up all sorts of strategic possibilities and leads to the game’s second big difference which is in variety of unit types. There will be more than a dozen unit types ranging from the more standard like skeletons and zombies all the way to more exotic units like hierophants, liches and death knights.

The third major change in Undead Horde 2 is right there in its subtitle: Necropolis. Whereas in the first game you had a central hub area that was sort of an underground crypt, in this sequel you’ll get an entire city called Necropolis. The living have razed Necropolis to the ground and stolen all of the souls of the undead citizens (those jerks!) and so throughout the game you’ll be slowly rebuilding and repopulating the city. Each new building your revitalize will also award some type of benefit like new abilities, perks, or stat bonuses in addition to just making the city seem more lively. Heh, imagine that, a city of undead being described as lively.

You can find all of these details and more in the announcement on the Undead Horde 2 Steam page, and there you’ll also find a link to the Discord server for the game where 10tons will eventually be looking for alpha testers for the PC version. The plan as of now is to get an Early Access version out on Steam before the end of the year, with the full game launching on PC and consoles sometime in 2023. And then of course bring out a mobile version sometime after console and PC, which in the past has usually only been a matter of months in between. If you have somehow not played the first Undead Horde yet it’s an easy recommendation from me and it’s available on pretty much every platform, and keep an eye out for Undead Horde 2: Necropolis when it launches sometime next year.