![]() There are mid-run shops to help you stay in better shape, but it's hard not to just hold onto your gold for the boring but obviously-more-valuable permanent upgrades. The upgrades are boring so this whole system just doesn't even need to be here except to pad out the whole experience and make beating it for the first time grindier than it could have been. This is one of the ones with an inter-run currency (gold) with which you buy permanent upgrades. I mean why would we look at a game from this perspective with almost no platforming and think lateral movement should be the focus? At least there is some amount of pits you can fall into after getting knocked back by an enemy and therefore taking damage twice from one hit, so that these two bad design decisions can feel more cohesive together. You do have a jump though, always a great inclusion in, ya know, top-down games. That's a neat idea, but there's no blocking or dodging and you're stuck in place during your melee swing animation, so you should probably just mostly stick to ranged whenever you can help it because you can just throw the pickaxe as much as you want at no cost. You have a melee and a ranged attack, whose damage and frequency are augmented separately, so in theory you could have a melee-build one run and a ranged build the next. So what's going on in UnderMine that's not so universal to the genre? There are decisions to make regarding your resources (the classic duo of keys and bombs), and opportunities for more augmentations at a cost. You know the deal: You start a run, see how far you get, pick up some items to augment your character's abilities and rules for the duration of the run, eventually die, try again. This isn't an Isaac post I was just opening by unfairly comparing UnderMine to Isaac when UnderMine should be treated and considered as its own game. (EDIT: I should not have been as reductive as "as good as Isaac." I should have said "as interesting to me for the same reasons as Isaac." Did not mean to bash anyone's babies.) But that first one? Wow is it increasingly amazing how impossible that is to find for such an oversaturated genre. ![]() ![]() Unsurprisingly, that second criterion is pretty easy to come by. This is my umpteenth attempt at finding a roguelite that's about as good as Isaac but isn't filled with headless babies and pentagrams and allusions to child abuse so that I can actually play it in front of my wife.
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