Game Review: Wall World
2026-Apr-17, Friday 10:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I had never heard of this game at all before it was recommended to me by someone who I work together with on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, so when I saw it was on sale for $2, I picked it up. When I checked it out on HowLongToBeat and saw that it was only ten hours or so, I figured it'd be fun to play after finishing all the postgame of Clair Obscur.
That's it. I usually have more to say in these intros but like I said, this game was completely new to me. I didn't have any preconceptions going in because I had no conception at all, so you're getting this with no nostalgia or anecdotes about the last time I played this. Savor it.
Climb that wall.
The backstory, explained in the intro that plays every time, is that the world is vertical and humanity clings to the side of the Wall in ramshackle settlements. Resources need to come from mines drilled into the Wall, and to get these resources, humanity built large spider-shaped tanks called "Robo Spiders" to climb up and down the Wall. No one has found the end in several generations and the narrator wonders if there even is a end. But, it's not too bad! The Wall has everything they need, and humanity could easily survive if it weren't for the constant implacable attacks from homicidal aliens called the Zyrex, who are so pervasive that only half of miners who go out in robo spiders return.
Now, the logistics of this make no sense. If the Zyrex are that strong there's no way humanity would bring back enough resources to be able to make all of those robo spiders and send them out, and if it's easy to make robo spiders then why does humanity need so many resources? That doesn't matter, though, because this is all just a framework to hang the actual going up and down the wall and mining resources part of the gameplay on. It's like how in Power Blade the reason you're fighting robot bees is because the Master Computer that humanity turned all of its warmaking resources over to went mad. Why is it making robot bees? Why in Wall World do the Zyrex attack in predictable waves spaced a couple minutes apart, giving you plenty of time to return to your robo spider to fend them off? Because we're playing a video game. Now get out there and dig.
I do appreciate the word "Zyrex" especially. That's a proper Golden Age of sci fi alien name. The only way it would be better is if it ended with "-oids."
Shine get.
The gameplay of Wall World consists of two phases, in and out of the robo spider. When in the robo spider, you travel up and down the wall and fight the periodic waves of Zyrex attack. When out of the robo spider, you go into the mines to gather resources and find upgrades.
At the very beginning, both phases are slow and clumsy. Mining takes a while of firing your exosuit mining laser at a rock, and you need to vacuum up any resources that drop and then transport them back to your robo spider before you can spend them. That allows you to buy various upgrades, like lasers with better penetration, faster exosuit movement, a laser splitter so you can mine more than one block at a time, and so on. Deep in the mines, you can also find new weapons or upgrades to your spider: bomb-throwers, stake-throwers, railguns, afterburners for a quick dash back to the robot when the Zyrex show up, all things you can bring along on the rest of your mining trip and buy upgrades for using the resources you haul out of the mines. The upgrades increase your capabilities, allowing you to better defend yourself and survive longer to bring back more resources, but eventually you'll run out of resources in the stratum and travel farther up or down to try to reach more cave entrances, which will throw an enormous wave of Zyrex at you that you probably won't survive. Or, if you're slow, the twenty-minute timer will count down to zero and a gigantic Zyrex will appear along with waves of lesser Zyrex. Either way, your robo spider will be destroyed, you'll get a brief animation of you ejecting, and you'll be back at the start screen.
But, this is a roguelite, and that means death has meaning. While the upgrades you find during the game vanish with every death, every block you break in the mines gives you resources you can spend in between runs, from faster robo spider movement to a quick-move jump up or down, from increased carrying capacity for mineable resources to a missile that you can periodically fire at the Zyrex attackers regardless of the weapons you've found in the caves. Doing this is the key to actually being able to progress in the game, because your starting slow robo spider will never be able to survive long enough or gain enough resources to make it through the increasingly-brutal attacks.
Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.
You mine and the timer counts down, but there's a separate Zyrex waves timer, so there's a tactical element in staying in the caves as long as you can to maximize your mining time before dashing back to the robo spider to repel the Zyrex. And at first, there's just a few aliens, either flying in or climbing the wall, so your slowly-rotating inaccurate machine gun is enough to hold them off. But as wave after wave appears, their numbers increase, new varieties appear that spawn other Zyrex or fire projectiles at you or get in close and explode, and your machine gun won't cut it. You can upgrade the machine gun if you want, but this is mostly a trap--no amount of upgrades will make it good enough to hold enough anything near the end-game. The solution is, of course, to delve into the mines and come away with new weapons and tools that will increase your fighting prowess.
In the beginning you need to fly right next to a block and shoot it with your mining laser for several seconds to break it, so your flow of resources is very slow, but the tools and weapons are deep in the mines and the mines get larger the further way you get from the starting stratum, so you'll need to increase your exosuit's power to make it through the caves in a reasonable amount of time. The triple beam pictured above is the end-state of your mining ability, but there's plenty of possible upgrades you can buy along the way. Eventually you'll be hoovering up plenty of resources on each trip, which is good because you'll soon learn that not only do different upgrades require different resources, different resources occur in different strata and deciding to go up or down at the beginning of the game will shape your entire playthrough.
You have to do multiple runs in order to discover everything and become strong enough to make it to the end, because many of the shop upgrades are vital to your run length. Increasing time between Zyrex waves gives you more time in the mines, as does increasing the amount of resources you can hold at once before needing to return to the robo spider. Without the missile from the shop, the first boss will be very difficult to kill before it destroys your robo spider. The meta progression elements are necessary to beat the game, but on top of everything else I've mentioned, the ability to buy those upgrades is tied to finding blueprints for them within the mines, and since there's a limited amount of mine space, you will need multiple runs before you have any chance at a winning run.
Capitalism, ho!.
And this is kind of the problem with the game in the end. Traditional roguelikes are entirely self-contained, giving you all the options you need to win right away, but even roguelites can generally be won by a sufficiently skilled or lucky player on their first run. I struggle to see how Wall World could ever be completed by doing the equivalent of a Dark Souls soul level 1 run. The robot spider is too slow and the exosuit's gathering is too inefficient, to say nothing of upgrades you find during the game like the mining missile that starts out a cave by blasting open increasingly large amounts of rocks so you have a huge open area and a large group of resources immediately. My beginning runs I still had caves left to explore in the first stratum when I died. My later runs, I had traveled all the way down to the bottom of the wall and gone back up and was hitting strata above the starting one when the final timer ran out.
This is the point I have to emphasize--Wall World requires grinding. There is no lucky beginner's run, you will have to deal with a slow robo spider and blasting through solid rock at a glacial pace for a while before you manage to buy enough upgrades that you feel like you might have a chance. Eventually you will get enough upgrades that you can consistently survive to the first boss after twenty minutes, and if you can beat that boss you get another twenty minutes before another boss. That was where the world really opened up for me, since the second boss killed me but that additional twenty minutes of mining with all the upgrades I had let me accumulate tens of thousand of shop currency and buy every single upgrade available. That got me to the second boss consistently and with an upgraded missile I pretty quickly beat it and managed the full hour of a run.
Then I reached the boss that one-shots you.
This is another roguelite progression point, where you have to keep doing runs to collect the MacGuffins needed to beat the final boss. If you don't have the MacGuffins, it's an unavoidable death. If you do have them, you win without having to fight and beat the game. It's impossible to beat the game with less than five runs, and you'll probably need quite a few more.
Welcome to the Meat Tunnels.
Your enjoyment of Wall World will greatly depend on how much you can handle this forced number of cycles, which will depend on whether you find the actual process of playing the game fun. I thought it was fun enough that I kept going through to beat it, but also it only took me twelve hours. After that the timer disappears and you can go through and mine everything without the pressure of bosses (though still fighting off periodic Zyrex attacks), but I really won't end up seeing anything that I haven't already seen while climbing up and down the wall. On the other hand, I got it for 75% off, and at that price it was a pretty neat diversion. Definitely a massive change of tone after coming off of Clair Obscur.
There is DLC, but most of the negative reviews of the game on Steam focus on how the DLC isn't great because it forces you to play a very specific way to win--you have to use a specific weapon, you have to explore the biomes in a specific order, etc. And Wall World 2 exists but the reviews are all, "The developers of made a sequel that forgets everything that made the first game interesting," so I'll skip that. But not long before I wrote this, they announced Wall World Strategy, a vertical colony sim, and that sounds like a lot of fun and something I would have never heard of had another DDA dev mentioned it to me. Keep an eye on this space for a future Wall World Strategy review
That's it. I usually have more to say in these intros but like I said, this game was completely new to me. I didn't have any preconceptions going in because I had no conception at all, so you're getting this with no nostalgia or anecdotes about the last time I played this. Savor it.
Climb that wall.
The backstory, explained in the intro that plays every time, is that the world is vertical and humanity clings to the side of the Wall in ramshackle settlements. Resources need to come from mines drilled into the Wall, and to get these resources, humanity built large spider-shaped tanks called "Robo Spiders" to climb up and down the Wall. No one has found the end in several generations and the narrator wonders if there even is a end. But, it's not too bad! The Wall has everything they need, and humanity could easily survive if it weren't for the constant implacable attacks from homicidal aliens called the Zyrex, who are so pervasive that only half of miners who go out in robo spiders return.
Now, the logistics of this make no sense. If the Zyrex are that strong there's no way humanity would bring back enough resources to be able to make all of those robo spiders and send them out, and if it's easy to make robo spiders then why does humanity need so many resources? That doesn't matter, though, because this is all just a framework to hang the actual going up and down the wall and mining resources part of the gameplay on. It's like how in Power Blade the reason you're fighting robot bees is because the Master Computer that humanity turned all of its warmaking resources over to went mad. Why is it making robot bees? Why in Wall World do the Zyrex attack in predictable waves spaced a couple minutes apart, giving you plenty of time to return to your robo spider to fend them off? Because we're playing a video game. Now get out there and dig.
I do appreciate the word "Zyrex" especially. That's a proper Golden Age of sci fi alien name. The only way it would be better is if it ended with "-oids."
Shine get.
The gameplay of Wall World consists of two phases, in and out of the robo spider. When in the robo spider, you travel up and down the wall and fight the periodic waves of Zyrex attack. When out of the robo spider, you go into the mines to gather resources and find upgrades.
At the very beginning, both phases are slow and clumsy. Mining takes a while of firing your exosuit mining laser at a rock, and you need to vacuum up any resources that drop and then transport them back to your robo spider before you can spend them. That allows you to buy various upgrades, like lasers with better penetration, faster exosuit movement, a laser splitter so you can mine more than one block at a time, and so on. Deep in the mines, you can also find new weapons or upgrades to your spider: bomb-throwers, stake-throwers, railguns, afterburners for a quick dash back to the robot when the Zyrex show up, all things you can bring along on the rest of your mining trip and buy upgrades for using the resources you haul out of the mines. The upgrades increase your capabilities, allowing you to better defend yourself and survive longer to bring back more resources, but eventually you'll run out of resources in the stratum and travel farther up or down to try to reach more cave entrances, which will throw an enormous wave of Zyrex at you that you probably won't survive. Or, if you're slow, the twenty-minute timer will count down to zero and a gigantic Zyrex will appear along with waves of lesser Zyrex. Either way, your robo spider will be destroyed, you'll get a brief animation of you ejecting, and you'll be back at the start screen.
But, this is a roguelite, and that means death has meaning. While the upgrades you find during the game vanish with every death, every block you break in the mines gives you resources you can spend in between runs, from faster robo spider movement to a quick-move jump up or down, from increased carrying capacity for mineable resources to a missile that you can periodically fire at the Zyrex attackers regardless of the weapons you've found in the caves. Doing this is the key to actually being able to progress in the game, because your starting slow robo spider will never be able to survive long enough or gain enough resources to make it through the increasingly-brutal attacks.
Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.
You mine and the timer counts down, but there's a separate Zyrex waves timer, so there's a tactical element in staying in the caves as long as you can to maximize your mining time before dashing back to the robo spider to repel the Zyrex. And at first, there's just a few aliens, either flying in or climbing the wall, so your slowly-rotating inaccurate machine gun is enough to hold them off. But as wave after wave appears, their numbers increase, new varieties appear that spawn other Zyrex or fire projectiles at you or get in close and explode, and your machine gun won't cut it. You can upgrade the machine gun if you want, but this is mostly a trap--no amount of upgrades will make it good enough to hold enough anything near the end-game. The solution is, of course, to delve into the mines and come away with new weapons and tools that will increase your fighting prowess.
In the beginning you need to fly right next to a block and shoot it with your mining laser for several seconds to break it, so your flow of resources is very slow, but the tools and weapons are deep in the mines and the mines get larger the further way you get from the starting stratum, so you'll need to increase your exosuit's power to make it through the caves in a reasonable amount of time. The triple beam pictured above is the end-state of your mining ability, but there's plenty of possible upgrades you can buy along the way. Eventually you'll be hoovering up plenty of resources on each trip, which is good because you'll soon learn that not only do different upgrades require different resources, different resources occur in different strata and deciding to go up or down at the beginning of the game will shape your entire playthrough.
You have to do multiple runs in order to discover everything and become strong enough to make it to the end, because many of the shop upgrades are vital to your run length. Increasing time between Zyrex waves gives you more time in the mines, as does increasing the amount of resources you can hold at once before needing to return to the robo spider. Without the missile from the shop, the first boss will be very difficult to kill before it destroys your robo spider. The meta progression elements are necessary to beat the game, but on top of everything else I've mentioned, the ability to buy those upgrades is tied to finding blueprints for them within the mines, and since there's a limited amount of mine space, you will need multiple runs before you have any chance at a winning run.
Capitalism, ho!.
And this is kind of the problem with the game in the end. Traditional roguelikes are entirely self-contained, giving you all the options you need to win right away, but even roguelites can generally be won by a sufficiently skilled or lucky player on their first run. I struggle to see how Wall World could ever be completed by doing the equivalent of a Dark Souls soul level 1 run. The robot spider is too slow and the exosuit's gathering is too inefficient, to say nothing of upgrades you find during the game like the mining missile that starts out a cave by blasting open increasingly large amounts of rocks so you have a huge open area and a large group of resources immediately. My beginning runs I still had caves left to explore in the first stratum when I died. My later runs, I had traveled all the way down to the bottom of the wall and gone back up and was hitting strata above the starting one when the final timer ran out.
This is the point I have to emphasize--Wall World requires grinding. There is no lucky beginner's run, you will have to deal with a slow robo spider and blasting through solid rock at a glacial pace for a while before you manage to buy enough upgrades that you feel like you might have a chance. Eventually you will get enough upgrades that you can consistently survive to the first boss after twenty minutes, and if you can beat that boss you get another twenty minutes before another boss. That was where the world really opened up for me, since the second boss killed me but that additional twenty minutes of mining with all the upgrades I had let me accumulate tens of thousand of shop currency and buy every single upgrade available. That got me to the second boss consistently and with an upgraded missile I pretty quickly beat it and managed the full hour of a run.
Then I reached the boss that one-shots you.
This is another roguelite progression point, where you have to keep doing runs to collect the MacGuffins needed to beat the final boss. If you don't have the MacGuffins, it's an unavoidable death. If you do have them, you win without having to fight and beat the game. It's impossible to beat the game with less than five runs, and you'll probably need quite a few more.
Welcome to the Meat Tunnels.
Your enjoyment of Wall World will greatly depend on how much you can handle this forced number of cycles, which will depend on whether you find the actual process of playing the game fun. I thought it was fun enough that I kept going through to beat it, but also it only took me twelve hours. After that the timer disappears and you can go through and mine everything without the pressure of bosses (though still fighting off periodic Zyrex attacks), but I really won't end up seeing anything that I haven't already seen while climbing up and down the wall. On the other hand, I got it for 75% off, and at that price it was a pretty neat diversion. Definitely a massive change of tone after coming off of Clair Obscur.
There is DLC, but most of the negative reviews of the game on Steam focus on how the DLC isn't great because it forces you to play a very specific way to win--you have to use a specific weapon, you have to explore the biomes in a specific order, etc. And Wall World 2 exists but the reviews are all, "The developers of made a sequel that forgets everything that made the first game interesting," so I'll skip that. But not long before I wrote this, they announced Wall World Strategy, a vertical colony sim, and that sounds like a lot of fun and something I would have never heard of had another DDA dev mentioned it to me. Keep an eye on this space for a future Wall World Strategy review
