Wall World 2 has a great core loop buried under a progression that never makes the grind feel worth it
I did not play the first Wall World, so I cannot tell you how much this sequel improves, expands or fixes the original idea. I can only talk about how Wall World 2 feels on its own, and for me, that feeling was mixed in a frustrating way. There is a game here I should have loved. I like mining games, roguelite loops, weird sci-fi worlds and chunky pixel art. Wall World 2 has all of that, but the way it handles progression kept draining the fun out of the parts I actually enjoyed.
The setup is immediately interesting. You ride a giant mechanical spider across the face of an enormous wall, looking for openings that lead into mines. When you find one, you hop out in your exosuit, float through the tunnels and start carving through blocks with a mining laser. Inside these procedural caves you gather resources, find artifacts, fight enemies, complete objectives and slowly work your way deeper until your inventory fills up.
And that inventory fills up fast. Too fast, honestly. The carrying capacity is tiny at the start, which means the rhythm becomes mine a little, go back to the spider, deposit materials, return to the mine, repeat. I understand why the game wants that tension, but early on it feels more restrictive than exciting, especially when movement and resource collection already have a slow, heavy feel.
Every few minutes, the game pulls you out of that mining flow and asks you to defend the spider. Enemy waves crawl, fly and swarm in from around the wall, so you jump into a rotating turret or whatever weapon you have equipped and try to keep them away. The idea works. It gives each mine a countdown pressure, and it forces you to think about whether one more resource pocket is worth the risk.
That is the part of Wall World 2 I genuinely liked. Find a mine, strip it clean, finish a small mission like locating miners or destroying enemy spawners, then move on to the next opening. It has that "one more cave" quality where your brain keeps making small plans before you choose to extract. The broader mystery of what this wall is and what waits at the end is enough to keep the structure moving.
The problem is that progression keeps getting in the way. Wall World 2 splits upgrades into two tracks. During a run, you can spend resources to improve mining power, exosuit speed, spider health and turret damage. Back at the hub, you spend resources again on permanent upgrades. On paper, this sounds normal for a roguelite. In practice, using the same resources for temporary boosts and meta progression feels awful.
Why would I spend valuable materials on upgrades that disappear when I could put them toward permanent progress? But if I ignore temporary upgrades, the run feels worse. If I buy them, the hub progression slows down. Instead of feeling clever for balancing short-term survival against long-term growth, I just felt like the game was wasting my time.
The permanent upgrades do not help enough either. Too many of them feel small, boring or poorly balanced against their cost. You grind the same early missions, scrape together materials, buy an upgrade and then barely feel the difference. That is deadly for this kind of game. If the main loop is repetitive by design, upgrades need to make repetition feel purposeful. Wall World 2 rarely gave me that feeling.
Visually, though, I really like it. The pixel art is gorgeous, with lots of small details in the wall, caves, spider and different environments. The scale is cool too. Crawling along this impossible vertical surface while storms, creatures and strange structures surround you gives the game a strong identity.
That is what makes Wall World 2 disappointing rather than just bad. The fantasy is strong. The core loop is strong. The presentation is strong. But progression is the glue that needs to hold all of this together, and here it feels stilted. I kept waiting for the upgrades to start mattering. Instead, I repeated the same couple of levels to unlock things that did not meaningfully change how I played.
If you already loved the first game, maybe this sequel gives you the extra systems and structure you wanted. Coming in fresh, I enjoyed the mining and spider-defense idea far more than I enjoyed the actual climb. There is a solid, addictive game buried in Wall World 2, but it asks for too much grind before it starts paying you back. I cannot fully recommend it, even though parts of it are absolutely my kind of thing. Thanks for reading!
