Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Roguelike and Roguelite games have exploded in popularity in the last few years and the genre has actually become one of my favorites. It seems like there are dozens of new Roguelikes released every month, so it’s tough to keep up with all of them and that much harder to know which ones are actually worth spending time with. Going Under is a Roguelite that I’ve had an eye on for a while, mostly thanks to its unique and colorful design and ability to use nearly anything in the environment as a weapon. I finally had the chance to give it a shot, so let’s see how it fares in such a crowded genre.
In Going Under, you play as Jackie. She resides in Neo-Cascadia and has just started an internship at a local company called Fizzle. As she starts at her new position, she soon finds out that her boss and her have very different ideas about what she will be doing in the company. He decides to send her on a quest to rid the area below their work building of the monsters living down there. The story is filled with a lot of humor revolving around startups, entrepreneurs, and the like. It wasn’t something that really interested me and most of the jokes missed. I quickly found myself mashing through the dialogue to get to the gameplay.
Once Jackie gets her job, she’ll be able to visit a few different areas, which are basically dungeons. These are actually the ruins of failed startups, and they are all quite varied with different aesthetics, enemies, and weapons. Each of these dungeons has four floors, with the final floor being a boss fight. With the game being a Roguelite, you’ll have to complete each dungeon in one life and none of your progress will carry over between runs. Every run will also be different as the levels are procedurally generated.
Between runs, you’ll sometimes get some narrative that helps progress the story. You’ll also be able to talk to a number of your co-workers as well. They will give you a bunch of tasks to complete in the dungeons and by completing their tasks, you’ll be able to use them as mentors. If you choose to have a mentor, you’ll get a variety of unique perks depending on how many of the tasks you’ve completed for that person. These include things like earning more money, being able to carry more of certain items, finding more of specific objects in the dungeons, among a number of other things.
The actual gameplay in Going Under basically boils down to a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler where pretty much everything in the environment can be picked up and used to fight with. You’ll be able to use trash cans, laptops, and giant pencils, as well as more traditional weapons like swords, hammers, and even guns. They will all break after too much use, and you can hold up to three weapons at a time. It’s a neat idea in theory, but I didn’t feel like it was implemented very well.
There’s only one attack for each weapon and you also have the ability to throw any weapon you pick up. There are no combos or anything like that. Hell, there aren’t even light and heavy attacks. This made combat feel very limited, and it got rather boring pretty quickly. Making matters worse, aside from having heavy weapons that make you move slower and the occasional projectile weapon, nearly all the weapons feel exactly the same to play with.
The same button you use to pick up a weapon is also the one you use to interact with other objects, so often I found myself picking things up when I was just trying to interact with something else. There’s also a dodge roll that creates other issues. If Jackie isn’t holding a weapon, she’ll pick one up automatically if she rolls over it. This was particularly annoying when I was trying to complete a task for defeating enemies with my fists but kept picking up weapons when dodging. Another odd choice I found was that when a weapon breaks (and this happens frequently) you don’t automatically switch to the next one in your inventory. It just felt very jarring to suddenly have no weapon when the game goes out of its way to make sure you’re always equipped with something in so many other scenarios.
As you make your way through each of the dungeons, you’ll come across a number of different skills that you can acquire. These offer a variety of passive abilities, such as letting you deal more damage, increase your health, move faster, and a lot more. When you have a skill equipped it will earn experience after each run and once you gain enough, you’ll be able to endorse that skill. This basically just lets you equip it and start a dungeon with it, but only one skill can be endorsed at a time.
There are also a number of apps that you can find as you play. These are consumable items that have a limited number of uses. They can do things like heal you, make you quicker, stun enemies, and more. Only one app can be equipped at a time. If you switch out an app for another, you’ll lose that app rather than just dropping it, which I found to be another odd choice. So, you can’t really use apps strategically by switching out for ones that will help immediately and then switching back to another that may come in handy later on.
Going Under has a couple different in-game currencies that you’ll earn during dungeon runs. There’s money that can only be spent in dungeon shops, which will allow you to buy health restoring items, skills, and weapons. There’s also a currency that you can use outside of dungeons and is the only thing that carries over between runs. This can be used to buy new skills that then have a chance to show up in subsequent runs.
From a performance standpoint, I also had some issues with Going Under. In general, the game’s controls just felt a bit stiff and janky. Between that and the boring combat, moving through dungeons just wasn’t satisfying. There was also some slowdown that made movement even worse at times. Another issue I noticed was that there were some extensive load times between some dungeon floors. This seemed to happen randomly, so sometimes you’d pop right in and other times it seemed like it took forever to load in.
Going Under has an interesting look and its gimmick of using almost anything as a weapon was a nice idea, but unfortunately that’s about all the good I can say about it. The gameplay gets boring quickly and is on the janky side. The story is also just as bland as the gameplay. Overall, I wouldn’t call it a terrible game, I just didn’t have much fun with it. There are too many great Roguelike/Roguelite games out there for me to recommend something that is just so “meh” like Going Under.
