Undergrave

Undergrave is yet another 'slam-dunk of a game' by Wired Dreams Studio! I had a great time playing through this game and recommend it to anyone who enjoys turn-based, tactical, puzzle-like experiences. Initially, I found Undergrave to be far more challenging (frustrating) than the other games I've played by this developer (Red Ronin, Upaon: A Snake's Journey). Not to say that these other games weren't uniquely difficult in their own ways but, in contrast, Undergrave has a bit more complexity and nuance to its gameplay mechanics while giving the player very little information on how to play. Much of the early gameplay is trial and error - learning the quirks of enemy movements/attacks, the introduction of new enemy types, and experimenting with the all creative ways you can dispatch them. The real genius of Undergrave's gameplay is that, despite its deceptively simplistic combat, you are very much limited by the cost of your movements/attacks (AP) and careless usage can find you inadvertently positioned to receive damage. Though difficult by design, Undergrave is still quite fair and approachable. After a few hours of failed runs and after finagling a personal 'meta' for perk selections [spoiler]iron knuckles/jumping supremacy[/spoiler], it all clicked together and I was then able to expertly complete each level with creativity and panache for all subsequent playthroughs.

I hated this game but I won't say it's not recommended because I know it will be right for some people. If you've played "Into The Breach" before, I think that will make for a pretty excellent indicator as to whether or not you will like this game. I, for one, can't stand it, but this genre of "puzzle games disguised as roguelikes" definitely scratches an itch for certain gamers. Give it a go, and see if it's one for you.

The game feels slow and clunky (UI), repetitive (worlds are a bit too long), upgrades aren't compelling. It's no Hoplite.

6/10 throws you into the game without telling you anything. takes a minute to figure things out no steam guides wrote everything down well playing here you go https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2991646188

Great game and a definite must play if you love rogue likes and turn-based games. Didn't take long to 100% and i love the NG+ characters.

If as me you love Hoplite and Into The Breach, then it's for you!

Great, addicting gameplay. Like a much simpler, purer version of fire emblem, in the best way possible. There's a lot of room for QOL improvements that could push this up a few points, like some kind of autosave feature. My game crashed at one point after completing two zones with no damage and after restarting the game, all my upgrades disappeared. There are also some small bugs like new enemies appearing in older zones or inputs sometimes being delayed. Would rate a solid 8/10.

I'm not too big into strategy games, but this is pretty cool, after a few deaths you get the hang of it, the ways you can kill your enemies are thoughtful methinks and what i like the most is how you can snowball your way trough the... dungeons? Also the replayability with the [spoiler]New Game and New Game+[/spoiler] it's really nice its fun

This game is quite fun but some mechanics are hard to understand. For example, when I stun enemies, sometimes they move on the next round sometimes they don't move. Am I missing something or is this a bug? Which skills stuns the enemies? We need more variety of upgrades. Life steal, shield, magic, calling your sword back like Thor/Kratos, etc. I know it will be hard to balance but making a overpowered build against merciless enemies would be fun. I am at the second place rn. I am going to keep playing to unlock new things. I hope there are some. IMPORTANT: Please change the poster. Your game has cool art style but that poster is just bad. You can do better. I almost didn't buy this game because of that poster.

Originally I was introduced to this game view the demo that is available to download and play for free on Android/IOS, I had played the Android version and was instantly hooked because of the amazing combat system and in my play-through of the demo I was under the assumption that this was a strategic through and through skill based game with light roguelike aspects since each biome only gets three chambers throughout it to select an ability boost or upgrade or when available, to regain some health. So seeing as how it was on sale in the Steam store I decided I had nothing to lose and gave it my 7 dollars and some change. I progressed through the first biome perfectly fine after a few attempts, was rather low on health after the boss fight so I choose to go into the second biome with a fresh clean slate run giving up the upgrades I had previously acquired from the first biome. This is when I had realized I was that Undergrave was not what I had originally thought it to be. Some roguelikes are designed to be more skill heavy while others are designed to be more luck heavy, rarely if ever a roguelike will strike that perfect balance somewhere in the middle. Undergrave definitely has no intention to strike that balance and makes it very clear early on that unless you complete a run start to finish without dying or losing once you are never going to progress all the way through to end, barring of course having a 1 in several thousand run where you do actually make it because the rng goes your way, which can and at some point will happen because that's just how math works. Unfortunately I had lost track of time and attempted a refund but was denied because my playtime was already over 9 hours. No complaints on my end there, rules are rules, fair is fair, I should have been more observant, but nothing lost, nothing gained and the dev definitely deserves monetary support. I know many people love and will love this game and hey, if roguelikes that are more rng intensive and brutal for the sake of being brutal and padding out the play time are your cup of tea then more power to you. As for me this one's easy to let go of and ultimately end up being replaced by Brotato, which is an amazing roguelike near and dear to my heart. All in all, I wanted to lay out the good, the bad, and the ugly of this game and make an honest attempt at a legitimate negative critical review because all the other negative reviews are not helpful or informative in the slightest. So all in all, I did not enjoy the nature of the base difficulty of this game as I was unable to find a way using movement and strategy in any optimal way to best the game. The enemy AI has unpredictable movement patterns that, at least for me, were unreadable so there was no way to gain an advantage there. The randomly generated dungeons and enemy spawns would sometimes give you dungeons with too many obstacles limiting your maneuverability as well as spawn in many enemies of varying types while placing you in rather close proximity setting up a very bad situation that you can't logic or skill your way out of. So for those reasons I cannot recommend this game to anyone that isn't specifically into and drawn to these types of games, because your success in completing a run entirely hinges on perfect play and maximizing your upgrades in the upgrades rooms without ever failing a biome once. Because if you do fail say on your third biome, you have no choice but to go all the way back to biome number one and start the process all over again from scratch. I could have lived with this if it was at all possible to backup your save once you reach an upgrade room, so that way if you do poorly attempting to reach the next one you could simply transfer the backup save over and start from the checkpoint. Sadly the game was coded in such a way that renders such an exploit impossible and even more fun to point out, the game is programmed in such a way that even cheat engine exploits will not work, I had wasted hours attempting to do so in the most complex way one can use cheat engine to achieve this. Not to mention that the game is so obscure there are zero guides for it so any and all possibilities a player such as myself with, what I would call, slightly lower skill level, could have at carving out even a slight advantage are practically nonexistent, and for that reason...I'm out as they say on the Tank ;) XD lol.