izigame.me

Dome Keeper formula, but with boring upgrades and unbeatable without grind.
That's a "no" from me.


Summary

It's basically a different take on Dome Keeper, but with meta progression and about 10% of attention/consideration Dome Keeper got. Meta-progression feels like you're getting tools you were supposed to have and not getting upgrades.
You control a person that mines and a spider that fights. Main takeaways:

You cannot win until you grind meta progression, because the spider doesn't have the capability to evade or tank damage.
Mining takes place in tiny cavities, which removes all exploration.
Meta-progression is awarded for digging each block, which means until you're done with it, you won't really care for efficient mining strategies and removes what little strategic gameplay this game could offer.
Upgrades are either boring flat percentage boosts, or gadgets that are useless unless you upgrade them using resources that you don't have.


Gameplay(6/10)

I feel like it can be good, but some of meta progression needs to be removed and built into baseline and some more creative meta (and in run) progression needs to be added. Gaining ability to evade bullets is not an upgrade I earned. It's a minimal functionality required for me to even feel like I have a chance.
At the moment it feels like an all-around worse version of Dome Keeper.
Spider
You start out playing a shoot'em'up, except you're a giant target moving 5 times slower than enemy bullets. You cannot dodge ANYTHING even at perfect circumstances.
To make matters worse, you shoot TINY bullets at small MOVING targets can move faster than your bullets. You cannot rely on skill to hit targets because RNGezus can just move then a few pixels and your shot misses. In other words spray and pray.
You are given an objectively bad experience as you start out, and that's mostly to make room for meta-progression.
Mining
You use a mining laser to break tiles and a vacuum to collect it (or pull it towards spider). It's not very different from Dome Keeper, but then again, it was never broken, so why fix it?
What makes mining worse, is again META-PROGRESSION. You're given meta-currency for every tile you dig, which means you're incentivized to dig every tile (dirt or resource). That removes the gameplay element Dome Keeper has, which is finding optimal ways to mine.
Upgrades
This is by far the biggest downgrade. Some of the tools I found were cool, but all upgrades are just linear increase in performance.
For instance: your weapon has 16 upgrades and all of them do one of the following:

Increase damage
Increase rate of fire
Increase turret rotation speed (the only thing that actually changes how the weapon feels)
Reduce Spread
Increase bullet size
Add bullet piercing

Notice how none of these actually change how your weapon works.
As a cherry on top, starting 3rd tier of upgrades, the upgrade costs resources that are pretty rare (I only got them in about 20% of my runs).
Finally you have random upgrades, which are a tiny pool that consists of upgrades you can can buy, OR gadgets and weapons, about half of which are completely useless unless upgraded. You don't really have the means to upgrade them until later in game, by which point meta-progression makes those gadgets fairly irrelevant to begin with. Weapons are mostly useless because targets are still small and mobile and 3 out of 4 weapons I've seen fire in flak cannon trajectory.


Meta Progression(4/10)

It's a shoot'em'up where you cannot avoid damage without grinding meta-progression. This game starts out feeling very bad just to give place to meta-progression and I hate it. It doesn't even try to pretend like it's beatable, which made me feel like I'm wasting my time trying to get to some theoretical minimum required to be able to evade projectiles.
I mentioned in run progression is boring and makes farming meta progression a lot worse. Imagine getting the same 5 upgrades you know are not enough like 5 hours in a row.
Once you finally get enough meta-progression, you can reach next stage just to find out, you have to do it all over again.
This game combines all the worst things meta-progression brings to roguelites so it will come as no surprise that I am not a fan of this system.

Controls

They use way too many keys, with unintuitive and non-rebindable key layout. I think it's another symptom of devs copying the formula and not taking the time to think how it fits into their game.
Example: These are controls when inside the spider.
E - Control spider (pilot is locked in)
R - dock/undock (while controling spider)
Q - Stop controlling spdier (pilot is released to mine)
F - Access upgrades (as long as you're controlling the spider).
B - Build (requires upgrades)
Z/X - cycle weapons.
1 - missile
2 - to dash up
3 - to dash down
4 (and onwards) hidden tools.
See any problems? Here's a few that haunted me in the time I played:

WAY too many buttons considering how little you actually do in game.
Dock/undock servers no purpose, because unlike Dome Keeper you can access upgrade in and out of combat.
i.e. the state of controlling the spider while docked (immobile) serves no purpose.
E and Q can be 1 button.
2,3 are horizontal controls for vertical mobility.

For starters being in combat and immobile has 0 value. This step can be skipped entirely
I started looking at controller controls, but they are in even worse state as they have exact same problems, but when in spider mode you're basically moving mouse with R-pad which feels awful.

Conclusion

It might be worth your money ($ per hour), but not your time.
If this game gets further development (namely improved controls and more engaging progression) it can compete with Dome Keeper at 20$ range.