Hold The Mine

The game as it exists now is pretty fun. It's a mix of tower defense/autobattler and mining game like motherload. While there are some buildings to improve your mining, the focus of build crafting is a lot more tilted towards the autobattler side. I've found that the characters have a nice mix of both internal synergies and synergies which hook them in to other characters. It's still early access, so there are still things to improve on aside from adding more content and balancing. I'll provide some feedback here: - The game audio default is too loud. Start it at the lower end and let people adjust from there. Loud noises can be dangerous to eardrums, especially with headphones on. - There should be an option to mute the game in the background. - Keybinding options would be nice. - Option to automatically skip the into cutscene. Also the current skip button only cuts part of the animation short rather than just jumping into the game. - The default camera speed is painfully slow. Thankfully there is a slider, but I think it could probably start in the middle of the bar. - Pan should be on the mouse wheel instead of needing to grab and pull. There isn't really a need for the zoom function. - Need a save and quit button. I don't want to have to leave the game running if I need to leave in the middle of a run just to continue. - The tutorial message kept popping up at the start of every run for a while. Although it seems to have stopped now. - Some kind of combat breakdown would be nice to be able to evaluate how your build is doing. - Some mechanics aren't super clear and don't have an explanation. For example, when something applies the character's "base damage" does that mean no increases effect it? Does that mean it's unable to crit? - When I initially started, I was a bit confused by the controls and it took a minute to figure out how to dig. While it's stated in the tutorial box, it didn't feel clear that you needed to use all of your pickaxes before starting, so upon clicking the button it did nothing. I have now noticed that there is a little feedback with the pickaxes briefly growing, but it is perhaps too subtle. I think part of this is that the button is a much bigger visual draw but doesn't provide any of the feedback. The button should be greyed out or blink red or something or perhaps a red outline around the pickaxe bar. Just something to draw the eyes to the relevant info. - The interface for marking and unmarking dig spots feels a little wonky. I have on more than a few occasions accidentally deleted marks when I meant to drag my mouse to the next block. - I'm not sure how I feel about the way the expeditions work as far as requiring you to use all pickaxes together. There are plenty of situations where it can feel bad to potentially waste pickaxes because you don't know what's in the darkness or because a special block like a bomb will clear away a place you wanted to go, so it would be a waste to dig past the bomb even if you don't really want to dig anywhere else. - I think I would prefer it if you could hold off on choosing things like heroes, buildings, etc until the end of the turn so that you can evaluate all of your options in the context of others you've gotten this turn. It can feel bad to open a thing, pick something, then immediately open up another with different synergies that don't work with the first thing you picked. It encourages leaning into more generic options early since you know you will be able to use them. - This is very much personal preference, but I really hate meta progression that just provides small power increases rather than unlocking variety. (Although thankfully the game also has that.) It's pretty boring to get +1 this or +10% that. It also makes the difficulty options feel weird. I won my second run of the base difficulty, but I got stomped on my first run of the middle difficulty. I don't like wondering whether I lost because I didn't have enough upgrades for the higher difficulty vs my own lack of understanding and I don't like feeling like it's correct to go farm the lower difficulty even when I can already fairly reliably clear it. Also, while some branches of the tree grant fairly generic bonuses, some give more specific power ups to certain builds, such as improvements to status effects. I dislike meta progression which limits the scope of my decisions within a run. I want to be able to just start a run and see what the game gives me without thinking "Well my meta skill tree took bonuses to status effects, so I should look for those and ignore stuff that doesn't work with them." The whole point of a roguelike is variety, so design decisions that limit that run counter to that goal. I've only played for a few hours now, so that's all the feedback I have so far. Keep up the good work, I'm looking forward to how the game progresses through early access.