Wall World Review (Palandus (Bone))
I was really looking forward to this one, having loved the demo in Next Fest, but after playing for nearly 5 hours, its really rough. Main reasons for downvote:
1. Ultra hard boss fight, that occurs every 20 minutes and gets harder each time. Enemy waves are often hard enough to survive and now we get this. Feels like a gear check too, as if you don't have sufficient upgrades you will die.
2. Mining is not as enjoyable as it was in the demo. So many blocks have so much health and mines are possibly 3-5x bigger than in the demo so it takes forever to get back to the spider. Even with a new ability overdrive. Blocks in the demo got blown up good and fast and with upgrades went even faster, but now the mining tool only blows them up good with upgrades and otherwise is too slow.
3. The grind is horrendous, and honestly unfair padding. Like an average good run (35 minutes ish), I get maybe 6000 diamond dust. Some of the later tier upgrades cost 30,000 dust, and there are multiple at that price. And then thing is, if you don't have these upgrades you can't beat the first boss, and then not the second boss. The demo was a good romp and didn't overstay its welcome. The final game abuses your time and is really not fun in the early few hours until you do get some upgrades.
4. You find relics, guns, and tech as you explore, but you retain none of it for your next run. But... you gather dust and blueprints that you do keep. I mean, why can't we have a starter loadout of 1-2 things of the relics, guns and such, to make the next run a bit easier.
5. You have to upgrade all your skills every time, which makes no sense. When your spider is lost, you eject out an escape pod. So shouldn't you keep your skills, when your skills are tied to your character? If it did, it would make the game so much better as often times I never see certain resources in a run.
6. Most of the weapons and abilities are very poorly designed and they feel like they are baseline value when upgraded and severely underpowered when you first get them. That isn't how things should work. Upgrades should make it feel better than baseline, not feel baseline.
7. Waves get bigger and nastier faster than you get good upgrades.
8. The bomb is still as useless as it was in the demo. Still can't stick it to walls, so unless you prepare a spot for the bomb in advance, it will be sup-optimal explosion.
9. The rocket defense is still poorly designed. It still only fires 1 rocket on long cooldown and often goes for a target you didn't want it to hit.
10. There isn't enough good metaprogression between runs to justify playing it longterm. I'm past the 2 hour mark, so I'll just wait for patches. Even the blueprints are poorly designed as you can only upgrade something once per blueprint then have to hunt down another blueprint, whihc is a lot harder than it sounds.
Overall, it had a lot of potential from the demo, and took 2 steps forward and 10 steps back. Maybe with patches it will get better, but right now, its not fun to play and the grind is just too much to get the player to the content of the game, where they will actually be enjoying it.