Tombshaft, the newest offering from developer doinksoft and publisher Lucky Cat and sees you jumping into a seemingly endless ruin in search of ancient artifacts, avoiding deadly traps and dangerous creatures all the while. Of course, the entire process entails lots of sliding down walls and navigating restricted tunnels, and you’ll get to face some challenging bosses and unlock new playable characters along the way. Basically, it’s your standard roguelike experience.
Each character you unlock has their own unique ability that makes them play a bit differently from one another. The ‘Birb’, for instance, can flap to gain a bit of altitude, which comes in handy when you have to avoid enemies. The Mystic, meanwhile, can use magic to levitate for a short period, and the Ninja possesses high speed – making him a great character to use in sections that have more enemies.
Upon completing a stage, you can choose to watch an ad to gain a bonus. These bonuses range from fire immunity, protection from spikes, or even a wisp that will tag along to provide assistance.
If you die, you’re given the option to either watch an ad or pay 25 coins to revive – but you can only do that once per run. This makes sense, otherwise the entire game would be too easy. Thankfully, as it is, Tombshaft still provides quite a bit of challenge. Granted, it’s not as difficult as, say, The Binding of Isaac, but still, just one or two wrong moves can result in your demise.
The game does feel a bit lackluster in term of level designs, though. There’s not a lot of variety between runs, so it all comes down to the gameplay, which is solid for the most part.
My biggest problem with Tombshaft is that it struggles to find a real ‘hook’ – something that makes it stand out. There is no challenging action like Dead Cells nor satisfying momentum like Downwell. After only a couple of hours, I started to feel like the only thing that kept me playing was to unlock more characters. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a decent game, and some people will definitely find it fun enough to stick around. It’s just that there are tons of better options out there.
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