Have you been looking for the next roguelite but wanted new gameplay? Look no further than Wall World by Alawar Premium, a mining, battling roguelike! Explore mines and discover more about the past lives that lived there, while fending off hordes of alien enemies set on thwarting your mining expeditions. Only by expertly managing your time and resources may you make it through the gigantic bosses that oversee your demise!
Wall World’s gameplay goes through rotating cycles of mining for resources using your plasma cannon and fending off your overworld mechanized spider from waves of aliens. By collecting the resources you gathered in the mines, you can upgrade your equipment to efficiently explore the mines and take down enemies. Within the mines you’ll find various powerups and equipment to go along your standard set of tools. While each run resets all your upgrades and progress, every block that you destroy in the mines adds points that you can use to purchase permanent upgrades to improve your next run.
The controls in Wall World could use some work. I played mainly on a PlayStation 5 controller, which made the most sense with aiming and movement, but the game wasn’t well planned out to work with a controller. Toggling between movement actions on the spider is awkward because it uses the same finger to move the spider, same with firing between the rocket launchers and the normal turrets. For the overdrive speed boost to move around the mine, there is no button I found on the controller to make it work, so I had to sit near my keyboard and press the shift key (ultimately defeating the purpose of using a controller, but I still used it out of spite).
I have to warn you first-hand: when you first pick up Wall World you may be really disappointed. Possibly a little confused. I know I was. The way the game starts is jarring. There are short tutorials explaining what you have to do, but you’re not sure as to why things are happening. Why am I drilling into the wall? What are these creatures attacking me? Sooner or later, however, the game starts to click. Besides being a roguelike game, it’s also a resource management and real-time strategy game. Waves of enemies come at various points in time as you keep glancing disparagingly at the clock, fearing what may happen when time runs out (if you make it that long). Once you start realizing that Wall World is about balancing your time and optimizing every moment, it starts to shine.
A lot of Wall World is actually pretty calming. Who doesn’t love digging holes and finding treasures? Certain materials are easier to dig through than others, but only certain kinds of resources appear in the materials. For example: blue diamonds are always present in each mine, but the green diamonds that heal your ship sit in the grassy roots that take longer to destroy. Having healing crystals be tougher to get makes sense because otherwise the game would be too easy. As you start to understand the purpose of Wall World and the pattern of gameplay, you become engrossed in improving your powers to steadily endure longer exposures to the wall. New sections of the wall become explorable, along with a slurry of new enemies. The problem with most roguelites, however, is that dying and restarting your progress constantly can be a little bit frustrating. To avoid this annoying mechanic you must be in the mindset of trying to improve your next run. The slight problem to this is that the mines you excavate are randomized, including the powerups you receive within them. Sometimes you come across bonus weapons that you can upgrade, other times your stats are slightly boosted. My longest run happened from getting multiple stat increases that I didn’t have to pay resources for. The big boss at the end of the time limit still obliterated me, however.
I have mixed feelings about Wall World’s art. On one hand the characters and setting can be really interesting, with these futuristic space colonies, hidden tropical paradises, and frightening alien creatures. On the other hand, though, the camera angles make the enemies look like tiny dots on the screen, the mines are bare and boring, and enemies blend into the color of the background. Perhaps if the enemies didn’t have to be so far away from the player to hit so the camera wasn’t so zoomed out, and if all the enemies and characters were outlined it would make what was happening on screen more readable. Including the menu screens, there seems to be two different styles of pixel art going on. One style is more detailed and colorful while other parts are crummy and hastily thrown together. My last problem with the art is the lack thereof in some places. The only way that you’re alerted that a new enemy wave is arriving is through the buzzing sound playing through the speakers. There’s no warning symbol or subtle flash to visually alert the player. What if the player is hard of hearing, or wants to listen to something else? More care needs to be taken to visually guide the player through what is happening in the game.
The music in Wall World is dynamic and reacts to the various events happening in the game. The backtracks when mining fits the chill theme and sets you in the flow as you’re breaking down rocks. The only complaint I would have is some of the sound choices. When you bring a new upgrade onto your ship there’s a loud fanfare that happens that doesn’t fit the futuristic synthwave theme the rest of the audio has.
In summary: Satisfying mining gameplay that becomes addictive over time. Great design in building up surprises and leveling up, but more effort is needed in the art and story progression.
Jordan played Wall World on PC with a code provided by the developer.
