Dome Keeper review

Drill all day and kill all night in developer Bippinbits’ shrewd amalgam of genres.

After landing on an alien planet and establishing a base of operations, Dome Keeper’s tiny colonist digs downward in hopes of unearthing essential resources. In execution, these moments feel uncannily similar to Image & Form Games two SteamWorld Dig games. As you excavate, you’ll discover telltale signs of adjacent mineral deposits. Likewise, terrain tends to become increasingly tough the further you drill down, requiring an increasingly strong drill bit. Both games extend a gratifying sense of autonomy, where you’ll inevitably learn the best practices for survival.

Making distinct tunnels can help speed the ascent back to your headquarters, where iron, cobalt, and water are automatically processed, allowing your settler to purchase upgrades. You probably won’t want to completely clear out large areas, either. Signposting is helpful technique, making the habitual trips back to surface that much more efficient.

Interestingly, there’s no danger associated with digging since there aren’t any enemies or hazards underground. But there’s rarely any serenity with Dome Keeper, as waves of topside creatures arrive every few minutes, determined to break the glass shielding that protects your surface-level base. Their sieges occur with clock-like precision, in increasingly numerous, varied, and resilient waves, making life under the dome exceedingly hectic.

Depending on the map size you select at the beginning of the game, you might have an hour, maybe ninety minutes to live. That is, unless you’re able to dig down deep enough to locate an artifact that’s powerful enough to defeat them.

Complementing the rather serene spelunking is some intense defensive action. Initially, your only weapon system are lasers that can scorch the invaders coming by land and sky. But it’s hardly an ideal system. The turret rotates slowly across the dome and takes several seconds to char a foe. Every wave, it grows increasingly futile, with antiquity occurring at a rate Tim Cook probably dreams about.

As anyone who owns a smartphone already knows, upgrades are a nagging necessity. You’ll never have enough resources to unlock everything or probably even a fraction of what you want. So, when you have some extra resources, you’ll determine if you want a better dome, improved weapons, a better drill, or even a faster colonist.  Naturally, there’s a tension between the slightly assistive and cheaper augmentations and saving up for some of the better ones.

Undoubtedly, establishing the best policy is where Dome Keeper shines. The tech tree is delightfully substantial. On one end of the usefulness spectrum are modest upgrades like visual reminders of the time left until the next enemy attack, the dome’s structural integrity, or even the number of resources you have stowed away. On the other side of things are advancements that let you shoot down projectiles or even use water to overcharge protective shielding. Like many games, it all feels like a sly critique of consumerism. Every upgrade that you once coveted feels thrilling at first. But as the level of alien adversity increases, you’re always envying the next tier of tools.

Dome Keeper also communicates the feeling of paying bills at the end of the month and determining what essential debt doesn’t get paid. With a deft sense of balance, there’s always one component left behind. It can be the sluggish transport speed of your little spaceman or having to estimate the time until the next attack because you’re too cheap to purchase an indicator. And there are always repercussions for your negligence. More than a few times, I had to suddenly drop my cargo into a deep trench otherwise the current wave of opponents would inundate. Other runs, I cursed myself for being too cheap on dome durability.

Most players will mine about ten hours of enjoyment from the game’s Relic Hunt mode before the thrill on unlocks begins to grow tedium. Dome Keeper’s sword weapon offers a completely different defensive system with its own tech-tree. It takes time to master, but also offers much more nuance. And while Dome Keeper’s menu hint at additional things to come, their absence limits long-term appeal. There’s also Prestige Mode, which shirks an endgame, in favor of competing for a high score on the online leaderboards.

The pledges of additional substance can make Dome Keeper feel a bit like an Early Access release. Everything is fully playable and there’s no evidence of any glaring bugs, but it’s difficult to fully assess what the final build will feel like. As it stands, Dome Keeper’s synergistic blend of genres and multitude of carefully balanced build decisions, is a promising start. But as the developers demonstrate, it’s the subsequent decisions that can really make or break things.

Dome Keeper was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.