Wall World Review

Wall World is a sci-fi 2D roguelite developed and published by Alawar Premium, who also developed games such as Necrosmith, Do Not Feed the Monkeys, and the Beholder series. The set-up of the game is that the world is completely screwed up after some sort of apocalyptic event and now humanity is forced to live on a Wall, which doesn’t seem to have an end upwards or downwards and must be traversed in robotic spiders. You play as Ben, who is sent out to gather resources after the nearby mines are depleted and, maybe, reach the top of the Wall. The story is okay, and you can learn more by finding hidden alcoves, but I personally didn’t find myself too invested.

Gameplay is separated into two parts: external and internal. In the external part, you’ll be climbing up the Wall in your robospider (essentially a mobile base), looking for weaknesses in it to drill a hole into it and start mining resources. However, after some time has passed, you’ll need to defend yourself from a wave of aliens who are out to destroy your spider and end your run. You do start with a gun to defend it, but as you climb higher enemies get tougher to deal with, so you’ll need to upgrade your spider, which is where the internal part of the game comes into play.

Once you’ve drilled a hole into the wall, you can leave your spider and start mining, vacuuming up anything useful as it's all used to upgrade your stuff. You only have so much you can carry though, so you’ll have to dump your loot in the spider before you can get more stuff. You can also find additional weapons and relics to expand your options available either for mining or fighting, like being able to set down turrets or generate bombs to mine faster. You need to do all this while also being on the clock. Every 20 minutes, you are forced to fight a boss, who will destroy you very quickly if you aren’t prepared. All this essentially creates a gameplay loop of mining, upgrading, fighting, then repeating. I really like it, as I’m constantly assigning myself new goals and adapting to whatever I find. It can be surprisingly addicting.

After inevitably getting your spider destroyed, you lose all the upgrades you obtained on the run and must start from scratch. However, you can increase your chances of making it further by spending the currency you obtain from mining to permanently upgrade your spider and equipment. Now there are quite a few upgrades to consider like increasing your robospider’s HP, making it go faster, and increasing the amount of time before you need to fight another wave of enemies. However, for the real game-changing upgrades, you need to find blueprints during your run. There were some upgrades I would’ve liked to have from the start, but overall I like this system as you’re constantly working towards something even after a failed run.

As for technical performance, it ran perfectly fine, no frame drops and I didn’t encounter any glitches at all. I would’ve liked a few more options to play around with in the menu, but that’s only really a nitpick. To be frank, I have nothing else to say about this game. It’s great for what it is, and at a really good price, it can last you a good while even if the main campaign is only 10 hours. If you’re looking for a roguelite, give this a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

Wall World is available now on PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG.