Undermine
Undermine is a room-based roguelike dungeon crawler where you delve into the depths of a mine looking for gold and relics. Weirdly, I actually enjoyed the whole thing and wasn't bored by the time I beat the final boss, so that's a big plus for a roguelike. The game also opens up a bit more after the last boss (which is really well scripted). The artwork is great, and the general game design is interesting and addictive. Combat feels snappy, and encourages you to take down enemies in the right order. There are also audio queues to tell you if there's a super dangerous bad guy in the room. Beat the main mine in about 16 hours. Relics, blessings, curses and shops shake up the runs a little.
Pros
- Nice clear pixel art
- Clever traps
- Interesting artifacts that change your abilities (but not by a huge amount, which I really like. I don't like items that completely change your playstyle)
- Good background music
- Clear minimap
- Elemental interactions. Put out fire in water, oil catches fire, electify water, slimes change element depending on what they land in
- Combat feels good
- Lots of NPCs to meet that add functionality like shops, upgrades, maps etc
Cons
- Minor annoyance - I don't like that little mobs popup whenever gold appears and try to steal it. I guess it's there as a way to force you to concentrate on picking up gold first? Dislike.
- Some of the descriptions are not clear. For example, the Gecko's foot says "Allows you to pick up gold at a distance". What it does, is make your thrown pickaxe collect gold. Or Impish Key Bomb "Swap your items around" I had to Google that to find out the it means "Swap the number of bombs and keys you have". This also carries into the relic descriptions which is a big downside. For example, a bunch of different items and curses "increase your swing damage" or "decrease your swing damage" but it never says by how much unless you go and look it up on the wiki. Lots of these effects overlap, and it's impossible to get an overview of what effects you have active or a total increase/decrease
- Sometimes the UI hides the corners of the map, which can contain gold or enemies
- If you're a fan of roguelikes where each run feels VERY different, you'll be disappointed. The relics generally make you stronger in certain ways, but not enough to change the fact that you always have a melee attack or a thrown pickaxe