Dome Keeper Review — A Frantically Fun Indie Game
A little bit of stress on a far away planet makes for a lot of fun.
Dome Keeper is such an incredible game. The core idea is simple: Mine resources below your base, haul them back, and survive by purchasing upgrades for your base and character. Dome Keepers special trick though, is its added urgency, which pushes you to be extra cautious with your choices. This combined with its roguelike nature makes for a really fun gameplay loop that’s easy to recommend to anyone.
Other games with similar mechanics by comparison almost have a cozier feeling to them. In those games the pressure is felt as you go into deeper and more dangerous areas, brought on through your own choices to continue to mine and explore at your own pace.
Dome Keeper takes that and flips it on its head by making you fight waves of enemies at intervals. Because of this, every decision made in every second is critical to your success or your failure. The alien monsters will come for you regardless of if you are ready or not. Whether your base weapon is upgraded enough, or not. If you’re unlucky and can’t find resources in the depths, that’s too bad, because the horde approaches without remorse. This is the urgency I’m talking about and it makes this “mine, extract, upgrade” game experience feel wholly unique by comparison, and makes for some great fun, despite the frantic nature of it all.
While I do love the urgency and difficulty of its intended hard mode, it is nice to play some of the easier game modes to get a handle on the other aspects that make Dome Keeper so fun, those being your character, dome type, support system, micro support systems, and upgrades for everything along the way. I could rattle on about that but I think it’s sufficient to say that everything is fun and has been well thought through. Some things have to be unlocked through play and most of them have branching upgrade trees, all of which help spice each attempt to keep you engaged enough to come back and play more.
The sprite work here is great, and animations are really well done. The creature designs in particular have a lot of charm, and I enjoyed rotating through several well imagined planets (or backgrounds) between attempts. The light background music perfectly accompanies your time both above and below ground. You can really tell that a lot of thought went into developing every aspect of the game.
Overall, I’m happy to recommend Dome Keeper to anyone. It’s a great indie package of a game that is excellently designed, and a lot of fun. Love playing on SteamDeck. Will definitely have to pick up the DLC sometime soon and see how that is. Thanks for reading!
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.