Recent reviews by [SAP]CommanderA

They are not wrong when they say that the dead are dumb in the description of this game. But I don't fully put the blame for how bad this is squarely on the shoulders of terrible AI, there are other things that also contribute to this being almost unplayable.

As first mentioned, the unit AI. Your units will move on their own throughout the world, completely skipping taking very important resource producing buildings like gold and iron mines, as well as crypts for body parts and temples for mana, in preference for small mana bubbles and gold coin piles. I witnessed in one game a group of three units completely move past the building, and wander elsewhere into the world. I found myself constantly having to micromanage and control units, moving them backwards and taking these structures and things they have left behind and missed.

The reason why this is so annoying and difficult to do is because the UI is terrible. You have to pause the game, stopping all progress, then not only click on the unit, but then click on the button down below that says 'take control'. Be careful you don't accidentally click on kill right below it if you are in a hurry! In the meantime the minion will just, stop moving. This is extremely detrimental when large swarms of enemies are attacking them, and if they stop moving, they will die. Doing this also freezes your screen in place, and makes it so you cannot zoom in and out, so you better have your screen zoomed out far enough to see where you want to steer your minion. If you try to move the screen, it will deselect your minion and they will go on their way again.

Your minions will spread out far and wide into the world to try and explore and kill enemy bases (and mainly fail at the latter), completely leaving your tower exposed and easily killed. You can select some minions and have them 'stand still' at your tower, but when massive enemy hordes and waves attack you, having them stand still is a death sentence. So you need to have them all moving again, which then makes them go off and explore once the enemies are dead, meaning you need to bring them all back in again. All with the terrible UI. This is so annoying and wastes so much time. Why is there no guard button? Or a button to recall units back to the tower? This game would be so much more improved if I could control them like an RTS, because the AI and commands are terrible.

Swarms of enemies will spawn from nests and settlements constantly. In massive waves, whether you have explored and found the nest or not. So you will be constantly attacked from all directions. This grows worse and worse as your minions spread out, as stronger and stronger nests are activated, and the world grows wider and wider. So wide that your minions do not seem to be in range to 'detect' these waves and move to fight and kite them and lead them away from your tower. This can cause you to have a completely unprotected tower. Or, it can lead to you having almost all of your units at your tower CONSTANTLY fighting incoming waves, never getting a chance to move out and leave. Then you die a slow death of resource starvation, as time keeps ticking by, and stronger and stronger enemies start to spawn and attack you.

I played about a dozen times, upgraded several components inside my tower, and was completely underwhelmed by them. The spells take so long to recharge they are essentially useless. If you want your lightning AoE or your gas cloud spells to recharge faster, you better be prepared to play this game quite a lot to GRIND out the gold required to upgrade them. The cat spell you get, where he runs around and collects resources for you is extremely useful at the start of the game, and almost required, but eventually all the resources are so far away he just dies out before he can get far enough away from your tower to collect them. Every upgrade has a major flaw like this.

I will give them credit for some things though. The pixel art looks cool and the animations are done well. The sheer number of different races and their body parts and weapons is really cool, and you can make some freaky looking minions. I was just hoping for more though. Like, a more polished game. Or even more units. You can only have a maximum of fifteen, and eventually the world grows so large this is just not enough to keep exploring, destroying enemy spawns, and protecting your base. If you could truly make an undead horde, I think that would have solved a lot of problems. If you could just keep spawning strong units from your tower for defence, while teleporting faster/weaker units out to the outer portals you find, this game would be a lot more enjoyable. With only fifteen, you are hamstrung, unable to really attack or defend.

I didn't think I would hate the screen as much as I did. The resurrection window is always open on the side, blocking a fourth of your vision, and another fourth of your vision is taken up by the 'orb' you are looking through on the edges. You often can see very little, having to zoom out, but then that just makes it so you can barely see whats going on down below you. This seemed kind of charming at first and reminded me of older games I used to play. But after about half an hour I remembered and realised why games don't do this anymore.

It is good they have this game priced at $3.90 CAD, because I would honestly say it is not worth any more than this. Thankfully I got the game on sale and even cheaper in a bundle, so I don't feel too put out. But still, I really can't see why this game has such a high rating. It is a brutally annoying grind where nothing works right, with so many problems and issues playing it, that it never really ever feels fun. Despite how cheap it is, I would not recommend this game at all.

While I went into this game expecting a grind, I didn't realise just how much there would be. I don't really mind grindy games, so long as they are fun to play while you do it. But with this game, eventually even with podcasts and stuff playing in the background, I couldn't keep going.

This game is very, interesting.. I did have fun, but eventually I got bored, very bored. Bored to the point where I just couldn't bring myself to turn it on and keep playing. It looks great though, super cute with interesting biomes, all kinds of resources and creatures, and tons of different crafting stations and research options. It will certainly keep you busy. I played it for over thirty hours, and I got it on sale for half off, so I think I got my money out of it, but still... I feel bad I didn't complete it, but like I said, I literally couldn't keep going.

The movement is super smooth and buttery, the same goes with the parkour. Hopping around the game world, from cliff to cliff and island to island was a ton of fun. Exploring all the different research trees and crafting benches, collecting resources and building a base. Creating automated processes for gathering certain resources you need a lot of. But, you need a lot of resources. Eventually, it isn't about the quantity of resources, but how slowly they take for you to gather them too, how long you have to wait..

I wish there was a mixed review function. There is a lot in this game to really love and enjoy, and if you have unlimited patience, nerves of steel, and tons and tons of time to waste, this will be a perfect game. It just could not hold my attention past a certain point. Perhaps I should have tried the demo first, but the ennui doesn't set in until way later on into the game, when you realise just how much work and how much time you will need to put in to make even the smallest bit of progress.

You move off fast at the start, expanding your first island, making more islands, creating new tools and equipment, but as you go on it slows down, and the progress you make is measured in centimetres rather than meters, and then in milometers. I would give it a very hesitant recommendation, and even then only on sale. It is not worth $20 CAD in my opinion.

Overall, I do like this game and would recommend it, but there were several things that bothered me and may turn people off of buying it if they find out about in advance. This will include spoilers.

Let us start off first with what is good. The pixel graphics look really great, everything is animated really well, and the backgrounds are really lovely. All of the different biomes you mine in for the myriad resources you need look cool as well. Each one is unique, and as soon as you open up the wall and see the first block you know what will be inside, and if you need to go in it or not. The music and sound effects are also really well done, and I didn't hear any stock sound effects that a lot of games fall on these days that really take me out of the game. It is a beautiful game all around.

Wall World is a world in which well, there is a gigantic wall. Why is humanity living on this wall? Who knows. There are some clues thrown about on computers and gravestones and such throughout the game, but in the end after twenty hours of playing, I never found out. Is there a top and a bottom? Yes. Do not go all the way to the top, as the final boss will spawn and instantly kill you. That is one of the things that I really disliked about this game. With no warning the third and final boss will always kill you when the last timer runs out, no matter how well your run is doing. How do you kill this boss? You are never really told. Figure it out by playing it over and over and over. It is a rogue-like after all. But, I find that to be a poor excuse. This nearly turned me off of playing the game, when after my third time of getting to the final boss, ready to beat it, it just inst-killed me and I had to look up that I needed one last key located at the top of the wall, but not so far that it summons the boss and kills you...

So, you need to find five keys hidden in the mines in the wall, and bring them to the very top of the map where the final boss spawns. After that, you are free to mine up the whole wall to your heart's content, or until the waves grow too big and eventually overwhelm you. I did get to that point on my final run. Once you defeat the boss, it does not come back, so you can just keep playing and playing and playing. So I did. I finally had to stop when there were so many enemies spawning it was lagging out my game, and I was bored at that point of shooting at them with my fully upgraded fusion gun.

The core concept of the game is mining. I like that and always have fun with it. You need to mine for resources to upgrade your gun and robot. You need to also mine to find automatic upgrades in the form of chips, as well as balls of technology you bring back and can then utilise. You mine to find better weapons than the machine gun (though none are really any better than the starting machine gun other than the weapons you find far later in the game), as well as blueprints, the aforementioned keys, and what ever currency you keep between runs you use to make permanent upgrades to your machine. Do enough runs, get the claws and the shields, and you will tank your way through this game and to the final boss no problem. Especially if you max out a shotgun and just use a fully upgraded missile launcher to target boss spots. However, eventually this does get rather dull, and I had to put on other things in the background to stop myself from getting too bored and quitting.

It is a fun game overall. The mining is fun to do, it is intense as you have to run back to your spider as a new wave or a boss approaches. But eventually, it becomes really boring. There are some rogue-like games I have played for fifty, even a hundred hours. In this game I killed the boss, fully upgraded all the kit on the spider, and got all of the non DLC achievements in twenty hours. So, it does get boring quick. However, it does only cost $9.00 CAD. Even less when on sale. In the end, I would give this game a light recommendation.

I can't give this game a positive review, as much as I enjoyed the old aspects of the first two games in here, I absolutely cannot stand what has been added into this one. A single word. Grind.

I played the first two games years ago and really enjoyed them. Simple point and click adventure games, with some puzzles, some hidden objects, and managing your inventory and your energy to perform actions. It was good, simple, solid fun. It was nice and calming and relaxing. You got to go on a fun little adventure, go from rags to riches, from a nobody to a hero. I had forgotten about this series, so I decided to pick it up during this last summer sale, and played it over the last several days.

I am also always looking for games where I can easily get 100% achievements. The last two games in the series were very easy to get 100% achievements in. In regards to those other games, yes they are short, and still aren't worth what they are being sold for (so buy them on sale). I have four hours with 100% achievements on the first game, and five hours with 100% achievements on the second game. This game I did FINALLY get 100% achievements, but only after grinding out TONS of levels and items.

You can sit in camp for a good 20 to 30 minutes at a time, just grinding out potions and food and weapons. You waste so much time going through the map collecting a ton of crap, just to hopefully, randomly, bring back one of the few iron/silver ore veins to bring up your mining. The same goes for lock picking. Also, I was stuck in the first portion of the game for nearly an HOUR, fighting the same rats and bats over and over and over again until I finally, randomly, got level 10 combat and could move on.

Your level does not go up consistently, it goes up randomly when performing an action. You also have a chance to not get an item out of that action, or get fewer items, until you bring your level up, which is seriously frustrating, because it means you need to go out and find and grind more items from the environment. This game took me twice as long to beat and complete 100% in comparison to the second game, but I had less than half the amount of fun. I was annoyed, frustrated, and bored nearly all the time I was playing the game.

Even on sale, I would not recommend this game. Avoid it.

This sequel does the first game proud, keeping all the things that made the first fun and special, while adding improvements to several parts of the game here and there.

It is in the end, still a point and click, sort of hidden object game, where you obtain resources to complete quests and finish the story. It is not hard, or stressful in any way. It is not difficult to figure out the puzzles. This makes the game fun and easy, at the cost of making it very short. I beat the game completely and got 100% achievements in six hours.

For the full price tag of $12 CAD? Not worth it. The game does show it's age in many areas, though the art style it has been done in helps to mitigate that and keep it somewhat timeless. If you can get it cheap and on sale, do so; especially if you are an achievement hunter. 100% achievements in just six hours, if you can get it on sale for 60%-80% off? Yeah, I would recommend it then.

A really casual, calming, and fun game to pass a bit of time. The game does show it's age now, but it still somewhat holds up due to the graphical art style and the simple way in which you play. It is a point and click adventure where you essentially need to find some hidden items and manage resources to make your way through the game and complete the story. It is very simple to play, and there are no hidden mechanisms behind the scenes or strenuous management that you need to do that could cause any stress.

I wouldn't recommend it at the current full price of $10 CAD, as even beating the game and getting 100% achievements only got me about 5 hours of game-play. However, if you can get it really cheap on sale, get it for sure. Especially if you are looking to find and play games where you can easily get 100% achievements. Again, not a huge time investment, but 100% achievements obtained pretty easily.

If you liked the previous game, you will like this. If you did not like the previous game, you will not like this. While the game is good, generally it is more of the same.

I personally really like this series of games, this kind of game. It reminds me a lot of my good memories with Motherlode. However, in this game there is no fuel tank, and no health bar. You can mine for as long as you want, and take massive falls down into your mine shaft without worry. There are also no earthquake mechanics ruining your progression. This makes it a very chill and laid back game that I could play and enjoy at my own pace without worry. I would just put on some music or a podcast or whatever and just relax. Some people may not like this, I love it.

While the voice acting is appreciated, it is not necessary for this kind of game. I can see that the developer wanted to improve his games and take them a step further, but he really shouldn't have. Not because voice acting in games is bad, but because the voice acting in this game was bad. To be fair, the main characters (the mole, main mission lady, main character guy, and old man) were voiced pretty well. Everyone else was a mixed bag. Either they were bad, underutilised, or had some really weird and strange voice warping. Like, I think some people voice some of the same characters, but they just pitched up and down the voices? It sounds really bad and was always a big distraction. I can't tell for sure, because when you beat the main story there are no credits, and there are no credits on the main menu. If I am missing them somewhere, my apologies.

Speaking of the story, there is a decent one now, with an interesting little bit of consequences/bonuses at the end. Earth is running out of resources so they send you to a star system with three planets in it. An Earth-like one, a volcanic one, and an ice one. I once again found the mechanics on these worlds (ice storm that freezes you, lava that overheats you) to be more annoying to deal with then interesting to deal with in any meaningful way. Yes, they added to the story, but overall the story was pretty weak. Both sides are cartoonishly stupid, which I guess vibes with the rest of the jokes and dialogue in the game, but I suppose I wasn't expecting it to be that bad?

Just mine straight down from your pod, connect the power plants on the sides to the main shaft, and run a wire down your main corridor. Every 100 blocks throw down a heater or a lava pipe, connect mines you find in open ravines along the way, dig to the bottom as fast as you can and all done. Personally I liked the last game better because you had to actually dig and mine for your resources while the mines gave you a passive income. In this game, setting up mines allows you to select the ore that you want it to automatically mine for you; so you can easily just tell it to mine what you need to complete missions and different tiers for more/upgraded gear. In the end it was a cakewalk that took away from my joy of mining in the game. I suppose you can challenge yourself to go without the mines, but if the mechanics are added in, why not use them?

An added mechanic in this game was passive upgrades and prestige levels. These were very appreciated and I enjoyed them, very nice. Not much more to say on this one. Customising your mech in this game did feel a little bit better and more expansive, but not by much. In the previous game you would pick different mechs that had different levels of stats (generally the more expensive they were, the better on the whole they were) and upgrade them with money. In this game you choose from several different modules to increase these stats. You have to mine specific resources to unlock them, then pay money to buy and install them. Not a huge change from the system in the previous game. Mainly just extra steps.

What the other game had with the mechs over this one, was cohesiveness. Yes, some of them looked silly, but they were designed as a whole to look like something. A bug, a scorpion, etc. In this game you start with a heap of junk and spare parts that looks like a pile of literal garbage, and by the end you have a huge super powered mech that looks futuristic and fantastic. Oh, wait sorry no, at the end all of the best parts also look like a random assortment of parts you would find in a hoarders house. A shark mouth for a drill, a magnet to lift you up and down, and boxes and bags on the back to hold ore and dirt? Why? There was a laser drill and tank treads just a couple tiers earlier! And in this one your character sticks his head out the whole time. Normally this would be nice to show off your barely visible pixel art character you made and the hat you gave them; but the guy should be dead with all the lava he drank. I guess the approach to the mechs is also the weird and silly vibe the game is going for? I dunno, I just did not get it.

Suffice to say, this game does not take itself seriously despite, seeming to want to be a more advanced, upgraded, and improved game that wants to be taken seriously? Again, I don't quite understand.

In the end, the calm act of mining through the levels, upgrading my mech (such that it was), and expanding my reach and all my mines through the solar system was enough, for me personally. Again, a calm chill game to play to wind down and relax while I hunted for achievements was what I was looking for. I beat the story of the game and got all of the achievements about 35 hours in, very much taking my time. You can do it all quite a LOT faster if you want to. I got a little bit more out of it, but not much. The rest of the time on there is just AFK having to go and run and do something else (did help me wait for my mines to pump out the goods I needed to upgrade my mech though).

The game is cheap, and I got it even cheaper on sale. If you are looking for a cheap, calm and relaxing game that is easy to get 100% achievements on and that will net you about 20-30 hours of game play, this is it. I would recommend it for what it is, despite the flaws. I am looking forward to what the developer will do next.

While I did enjoy playing parts of this game, there are so many issues and problems with it, that in the end I have to give it a negative review.

The game is over a decade old now, but the developers can't seem to fix any of the problems the game has. Normally, someone might respond with, if the game is over ten years old, why would they bother to fix it if it is released, over, and done with? Well, the fact that they keep releasing DLC for it, up even until 2024, is the reason. If they are still profiting off of this game by releasing sub par, overpriced DLC, with no other games to their name on Steam to work on, then yeah, maybe they should be fixing some of the base problems with the game; especially if those problems are exacerbated by the mechanics introduced in the DLC.

The first thing to start with would be, just the basic language of the game. There are constant spelling and grammar issues everywhere. Other areas, like the in-game guide, look like it was written and made by English literate fans and just cut and pasted in the game. The worst area you can see this is actually in the achievements, where half of the names and descriptions make no sense. Yes, I understand the developers of the game may not have English as their first language, so maybe hire someone to do basic proof reading? Maybe even get a devoted fan, or put in a feedback button? It just seems to sloppy and lazy.

Then there are the menus, which I found to be extremely annoying to use. Different items are sorted into different areas. Raw resources, manufactured goods, weapons and armour, etc. However, quite a lot of the time, items don't go where you would think they would go. Why is this building required for crafting or eating in decorations, while others just like it are placed in the manufactured goods area? Why are all of the spells mixed in with items the dwarves can equip? Why am I getting recipes to make items for things that can only be made in the DLC? Why is there no button to cancel the production of goods, or the ability to enter in the exact number I want, or for an unlimited, constant stream of items? Why do the pages of the menu constantly shift and slide around when I am making things? Stay on the page I am on!

The game gets to be like this constantly. Little annoyances all the time that just add up, and build and build and build. Why are the dwarves so dumb? Yes, I have gone through all of the options to customise their priorities, but they are still so, so dumb. If I set you to a mining task, keep mining. Don't walk all the way down into the mines, break only one of the ten blocks a selected, then go back up to stand there and do nothing. Why would you only create 1 of the ten items, walk away (leaving the crafted item on the ground), to go and make or do something else? They are so bad at just doing their simple tasks, and it is so frustrating. To have a dwarf working on and creating several items that you need, only for the dwarf to create one of them, and drop it on the ground and not bring it to the stockpile, is such bad prioritisation, path finding, and unit AI, that I don't really know how they felt this game could be released.

What is worse is that they aren't even making room for someone who has the better skill to make the item faster. I have had my dwarves with the cooking skill leave the kitchen for someone with zero in the skill. If they did this in something like Rimworld, people would be going insane. Then there is the fact that your dwarves only get three skills, and they start with one filled out. So if you get several of your dwarves spawned in, and they all have fishing, and you have no water nearby to use, you have to either try to go on as best you can, reset your game, or cheese the system and kill the dwarves.

This game has an enemy invasion system, where every fifty minutes portals spawn a bunch of enemies depending on how high your tech tree is and how many dwarves you have. I had to look this up to find out, because I was prioritising research and building down the more peaceful parts of the tech tree, so I ended up slowly getting swarmed with more and stronger enemies. The main factor seems to be based on the number of dwarves you have, so if you try to keep your numbers down in order to make the waves less painful, the game plays slower. But no matter what, you gain XP (especially by killing), and gaining XP gives you dwarves, which causes more monsters to come at you. It is an extremely annoying mechanic that I hate, so much.

Then there are the constant bugs. The first several dwarves I have spawn in on a mission often have the name 'Who Am I?' and were completely bugged out, unable to learn skills. Yes, I tried as many ways to fix it as I could. There is the merchant, who plops down from a balloon in the sky, and if he lands on an area that doesn't exactly fit his cart, it creates dirt blocks there and under it. This is awful if he lands near or on your base, as he deletes trees or crops you have been growing, defences you have been digging or building, or just a part of your roof. He also forces your camera to it, no matter what you were doing, and slows down your time settings. Then there is constant the crashing, which seems to happen every time I played the game for longer than 3-4 hours at a time.

Honestly, there are so many better, polished, finished games out there in this genre now. I had purchased this game way back in the day in Early Access, and I have kept coming back to see if it had been worked on or improved or made worth my time; but it is perfectly clear now it is not and never will be. The developers simply do not care, they do not think anything is worth their time to fix, even spelling errors that could easily be changed in an instant. It is just a cash cow for them to keep milking every couple of years, a dead horse to kick while they make mobile games on other platforms. Do yourself a favour, ignore this game completely and go play something else.

Another game and another reason why I don't buy Early Access anymore. I got this back in the day and played it for a bit, and realised it needed to cook. Came back to it ten years later, and it has not been worked on or finished at all. Abandonware, avoid it and anything the developer makes in the future at all costs.

I don't really understand the hype and popularity around this game, now that I have played it. It looked fun, but honestly, it is not very good. The game-play is overly simple to the point of becoming repetitive, and the visuals and story just aren't enough to save it from this. It kind of feels like it is made for kids or something. Which, I guess I should have got from how it looks and presents itself, but there should be something else here, right? With a 96% score? Right? I don't understand how I am basically the only person who doesn't seem to like this game. Maybe it is the multiplayer that saves it? But even then, I honestly wouldn't recommend it, and certainly not at the full $17 CAD price.