izigame.me

TLDR: Great idea killed by extremely poor and tedious RNG implementation.

I bought it on sale for £1.76, was it worth that? Yes, I guess so. Would I pay anymore? Absolutely not.

I love the art style and premise, that's what drew me in. But it's completely imbalanced.

Basic overview - You crawl up or down a wall in your robot spider looking for openings to mines that hold resources and/or upgrades, you set your spider down and venture into the mines to collect resources so you can upgrade your weapons/spider/mining suit. Periodically you will have to race back to your spider to face waves of enemies, each wave getting harder and harder, eventually culminating in a "boss fight" every 20mins or so.

Sounds ok, right? Well no, and this is where it gets frustrating. I've had multiple runs where I'm walking up or down the wall looking for mines so I can get some resources to upgrade weapons, and the mines don't spawn. So I'm facing harder and harder waves of enemies with ZERO oppourtunity to upgrade. So that run is a write off and you get swarmed so quickly it's impossible to fight back.

Most of the weapons you find are pointless to upgrade because it's so tedious getting resources. So the best tactic seems to be just upgrade your starting machine gun, every single time. There's a couple of others that are useful, but only if you find them early and get lucky with the RNG of the mines you find.

The resources are just different coloured crystals that change depending on how far up or down you've travelled, the epitome of boring. But, the further you travel the harder blocks are to mine, and you start with a shitty low grade mining drill, so don't bother trying to jump to the good stuff before slogging through the same 20-40mins of tedium you've tried multiple times before.

The best roguelites give you the feeling that each time you start a run, you have a chance to win.

Whenever I start a run with Wall World it just feels like I'm waiting to get fucked in the ass by RNG.

Such a shame.

Disclaimer: I've finished the (base) game in 6 hours. I've gotten and used all the upgrades, weapons and gadgets. There's no value in replaying the game and I cannot understand how other reviewers have over dozens of hours in this game. Also for those who're looking for games with short pauses, this isn't it. Every run is up to 1 hour long, there are no checkpoints AND YOU CAN'T SAVE MID-GAME (which is simply silly).
Initially this game looks fun, the idea seems cool and I got it on sale so all good reasons to play a game. The gameplay itself started out alright and the lore felt like it had potential. Discovering secret rooms and traversing the wall was nice mostly because the background art was amazing, and the resource vacuum mechanic was nice to play around with. After about 3-4 hours of playing though, I've seen it all.
The game is just clearing a cave and then moving to next cave and clearing it and so on. There's nothing unique or interesting about any of them besides having different sprites for some caves. Eventually in your run you reach large maze-like caves which only makes the experience of exploring them more tedious and annoying.
In every run, you'll find TOO MANY different gadgets and weapons. Most of them aren't that useful or aren't worth improving in the first place. It just feels overwhelming and pointless, and because you'll be overloaded with them, whenever you find an upgrade it'll most likely be for an item you don't even use, which is nice.
After dying you're allowed to upgrade your ship and it feels like every upgrade is only meant to help you play the game less and sprint to the finish as quickly as possible. On my last run I wasn't even really focused on getting resources or exploring because my ship was overpowered and much of the mining was done by it anyway. I solely focused on drilling straight into the wall and looking for (spoiler) the keys that'll unlock the ending.
The lore, which I thought had potential, was very disappointing. You'll find pieces of the story scattered throughout the caves but they don't amount to much. The overall story is unfortunately pretty bland and shallow and the ending is very anti-climactic.
On a personal note, I was ready to quit this game after (spoiler) losing in an unwinnable situation. At the hour mark, after literally spending an entire hour of upgrading and improving, the boss will come over and K.O you, there's nothing you can do about it. It was extremely annoying since I thought I was ready to destroy it and continue exploring
After a bit of online searching I realized I was very close to the ending at my current state so I just went on another single run and finished the game. The ending, as I mentioned, was disappointing as it explains nothing of the game's world and is VERY anti-climactic.

Do you know about games leaving you wanting for more?
yeah this is one of those games.

it looks GREAT. lots of character.

however.
i completed a run....

yet i'm unsatisfied, because i have a vehicle that is fully ugraded in the menu, with NOTHING to do with it.

when the game is completed, that's it buckaroo, you dont get to explore the wall completely anymore, you will get one panel & no possibility to explore like before.

you might wonder, what's about this guy and his panels? well, you see, when you unlock a certain thing, you actually change the map for another (vertical) panel.

and there's no gate in the endgame panel, so you cant get the full wall anymore. you go up and down the entire map in 5 minutes.

there's a DLC, but it doesnt really expand the game per se, well not to the amount that it's billed for, and the reviews kinda put me off buying it.

It's been nearly a year since developpment stopped and a good third of the tools are still pointless.

the singularity generator is terrible. high cost to upgrade, low performance early on and it's one the last weapons you get...

the stake thrower is supposed to be an early high pen weapon, ends up being useless, even upgraded due to the potential of the explosive weapons available (you know, not having to aim all that much, just mopping up half the screen with a blanket of grenades, etc...

the shotgun is obsolete the second you get the cluster grenade launcher and/or the bomb thrower, because it's a hollywood shotgun. and you get it AFTER both in most cases. it's only good at clearing large groups of flying prawns.

the buildable replicators are underwhelming, even full upgraded...

and of course, once you've completed the story, it counts as a death, so you're back to square one, on a smaller map, with nothing to do.

i've been pondering about ranting about this, tbh.