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A Brief Summary
Wall World is a roguelite split between resource collection and combat in defense of the spider mech used to scale the seemingly infinite space of the wall. While the moment to moment gameplay isn’t that deep or interesting in most cases, Wall World enhances itself with its continual race against the clock. Unfortunately, the premise—though interesting—serves as set dressing and little more. The game is generally pretty good, but can easily devolve into tedium once the novelty wears off.
The Basics
The gameplay is split between digging for resources and battling off the routine waves of zyrex. With each wave being stronger than the last, the player is pushed to find ways to maximize the amount of resources they can extract with their time in the caves and how to make the most of their weapons in combat. Sooner or later, the mech will be overwhelmed and destroyed, triggering its recovery systems to send the pilot home with their spoils.
Mining
The mech can bore holes into weaker spaces on the wall, allowing the player to disembark and harvest the resources inside. Diggers are equipped with plasma cutters for destroying blocks and uncovering ores in the mines. These ores can then be collected and pulled along with the vacuum on the plasma cutter and deposited in the spider at the mine entrance. Ores buy upgrades, with every tool at the player’s disposal having its own upgrade tree. This means a more efficient plasma cutter for gathering or higher damage and firing rate for the machine gun. Thorough digs take time, but can unveil new tools and weapons in these caves, each with their own sets of upgrades. Stuff like a mineral scanner or mortar. Different tools present themselves in each run, supporting different strategies for surviving the wall.
Combat
The screeching of the timer will routinely remind the player of the next swarm of zyrex approaching and that it’s well past time to get back to the mech. The majority of zyrex will approach from the air, generally lobbing globs of acid at the mech once they get in range. Others will approach the player’s position from other places on the wall, blocking the mech’s path. To handle these threats, the mech is equipped with a rotating turret that can change its weapon on the fly. The standard machine gun the mech always starts with takes time to turn towards enemies, its slower rate of fire and shaky aim making it difficult while its low damage is the bare minimum required to knock out a basic zyrex flier in one hit. While the player can improve in their evasive maneuvers and aim, there is a point at which damage is inevitable. Without upgrades, the player will succumb to the ever stronger waves of enemies.
Time Pressure
Along with the timer tracking the next wave of zyrex, another timer counts down from twenty minutes. Combat buys time to gather resources. Mining is a scramble to grab more resources and new tools. There will never be enough resources to upgrade everything, with efficient time usage allowing a player to cover more bases. As they become familiar with the wall, they’ll gain an understanding of where to find ores and the likely location of various tools. There’s always a next step and more power to pursue.
The wall is not conquered; it is endured. Survival is an act of defiance that the player is able to push that little bit further with each run.
Progression
In addition to unveiling and dropping valuable ores, each block mined grants the player a small amount of currency that can be spent after the run. During their runs, players will find no shortage of mechanical flaws that hold them back. Money buys parts for a better mech. A stronger engine for faster traversal. A missile launcher to knock out large enemies. Armor that doesn’t splinter when struck. Each upgrade fits cleanly into a problem the player will face, with the player picking up one or two of them before returning to the wall. Since the majority of upgrades are passive, it’s pretty much impossible to choose one that won’t be useful.
Issues
Tedium
After putting a few hours into the game, many players may find that their later runs are almost all identical. Namely, there is a right way and many wrong ways to climb the wall. As the routes all blend together, so do the enemies. While the zyrex have some variety, the most impactful change between waves is the increased durability and damage of each unit. Like the enemies, the primary difference between areas is the durability of the blocks in each mine. While the tools available to the player change between runs, the limited resources eventually push players to put all of the upgrades into a select few tools they’ve found to be useful. Weapons in particular are fairly useless when unupgraded. The constant feeling of discovery and growth slowly dissolves into a cycle of ever inflating numbers.
Trivializing Progression
As with many other rougelites, progression between runs enables the player to get further. Wall World’s approach to progression starts the player’s mech in such a state that it’s destined to fail. While it starts with a slow pace that highlights the scale of the wall, later upgrades will have the mech galloping up and down the wall’s surface. The machine gun starts weak, but that’s fine when the mech is capable of trampling foes without a need for standard weapons. Armor upgrades multiply the effective health of the mech to several times its base value while various system upgrades can obsolete half the mining. The upgrades need to be this strong because those offered to the player during the run can’t meaningfully compensate for a weaker mech. Ultimately, the game is won primarily through the upgrades between runs, not the player’s skill.
Writing
Premise
The wall extends as far as the eye can see in any given direction. Rumor has it that there’s an edge out there… somewhere. Legends state that people once lived on the ground at the bottom, though no one from the cities has ever witnessed such a thing. With the constant threat the zyrex present, few are willing to venture out in search of the wall’s limits. Though few return alive, a gradually increasing number of diggers must be dispatched to supplement the dwindling resources of the cities’ local mines. Among the ores within the wall, miners who venture beyond the cities often uncover long abandoned ruins. Civilization has existed on the wall for the entirety of its recorded history—perhaps longer.

Set Dressing
The lore is more of something extra that’s attached to the game, rather than a critical part of it. There’s nothing to investigate, as the lore is primarily delivered by the same people and logs in the same caves which spout different information each time they’re encountered. While the player can explore up or down to see if there’s an edge, the majority of discoveries about the wall amount to nothing.
The wall merely exists. Though people live on its surface and in its alcoves, the player doesn’t interact with them or learn about how the wall shapes their lives. Neither ascending to the heavens nor climbing down to the depths below introduces any new challenges. Remove the lore from the game and nothing about it fundamentally changes.
ConclusionAt its best, each run is a race against the clock, pushing to find strategies to shave off seconds to get enough resources to survive that little bit longer. Imagining what may lie at the theoretical top or bottom at the wall is quite exciting while those questions remain open. Eventually, it becomes clear that the game is only ever going to be more of the same with each new run. Wall World is entertaining for the majority of its runtime and not much else.
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