Review BadBoyBule 4/5 · Jun 26, 2024
Great little platforming roguelike
Downwell is a fun little game. Your aim is to reach the bottom of the well. Your means to do so: jumping on enemies and shooting downwards for destruction and airtime. Occasionally you come across different weapons as well as shops where you can buy bigger ammo capacities and HP.
The game is divided into levels, and after each level …
Downwell is a fun little game. Your aim is to reach the bottom of the well. Your means to do so: jumping on enemies and shooting downwards for destruction and airtime. Occasionally you come across different weapons as well as shops where you can buy bigger ammo capacities and HP.
The game is divided into levels, and after each level you get to choose a perk. Basic stuff. However, the gameplay is so fast-paced, fluid and fun that it makes Downwell shine. There's a distinct arcade-like quality to the gameplay where you gradually learn the ins and outs of the game and want to have just one more go to get further than before. Naturally, there are highscores and statistics to back up this arcade vibe. One very cool arcade-like game mechanic is a combo counter. By killing enemies in succession without landing on platforms racks up a combo counter, and reaching certain thresholds grants you extra bonuses when the combo finishes. It's a simple trick to make you strive towards mastery.
Downwell is visually also quite striking. It's a 2D pixel art game with quite low resolution and only three colours used at a time. This gives the game this off-kilter retro look. Also, there's often quite a bit going on on the screen, like tons of bullets and explosions, so the simplistic look of the game helps a bit to make out what's going on. The game also has a nice progress system where you unlock different "character classes" and colour pallette variations by playing. Again, simple but effective.
I think the main flaw with the game is the lack of variety. There's quite a limited amount of perks to choose from which results all runs ending up with a pretty similar build. Also, there's not really many incentives to play the game differently. You always ought to get as much currency as you can, rack up combos up to a certain point, always grab new weapons if you see them and so on.
Much of this simplicity and lack of variety can be forgiven since the game is dirt cheap. For me, it was 2,99€. In fact, it was so cheap that I bought it three times: for mobile, Steam and Switch. It's a nice little time-waster that I thought would be good to have on whatever platform I have nearby.
