I had fun playing this one, mostly. Fighting mechanics are simple without being too limiting, often when a run fails it's not down to RNG and enemy variety is reasonable. The story is nothing to write home about but it doesn't get in the way of gameplay.

However RNG can sometimes make or break a run, especially as you unlock more and more items that can spawn in. You're just as likely to get items in one run that:
- increase/multiply gold
- make gold heal you
- make gold explode enemies and
- magnetise gold to you
as you are to get random items that synergise in no practical way.
What to do in that situation? Mothball the run? Persevere knowing you could be having more fun? It's a tough choice and not conducive to an enjoyable experience.
Also post-game content is extremely grind-heavy and adds very little in the way of fresh new experiences.

At this point in my review, I've put a lot of time into this game, over a few years, and I am three achievements away from 100%, with the last three being very grindy achievements.

Yes, this game is heavily inspired by The Binding of Isaac, but it's not as hard as that game, and has a completely different aesthetic that I enjoy very much. It has a great risk vs. reward management system, and allows you to do some really nutty things if you get good luck and the right items. Combat feels good, there were some hitbox issues when the game was newer but they have been fixed over time. I genuinely think it's an amazing roguelite.

The reason it's only four stars, is because there are SO MANY achievements, with a good amount of them being grindy, or involving pure luck. The last three achievements I have to do are beat 30 runs with scaling difficulty (I'm on run 20), and to beat the last two bosses with no upgrades. These three achievements have kept me playing this game for way longer than I wanted to, and greatly hinder my enjoyment of the game. I don't feel like I'm working towards anything, and I'm at the point where if I DON'T get certain items and I DO get certain enemy spawns, the run is over.

I know it's a self-imposed challenge, though, so it doesn't hurt my opinion of the game too severely. It's definitely worth at least getting through the main story and unlocking as many relics/potions/blessings as possible.

DISCLAIMER:
This review is entirely for my own sake. You are welcome to read it but it may or may not contain spoilers for the whole game.

I only started playing this game because a friend gifted it to me on a whim. It was a fun Roguelite where the permanent upgrades always had you making it further and further into each run. Once you start beating runs, though, the fun starts to plateau and the grind sets in.
It is clear the developers expect players to keep playing the game hours upon hours after beating the game (clear by having a 100 death achievement and a 30 successful runs with scaling difficulty along with having to get enough resources to buy all the blueprints)
The true Roguelike mode might be fun, but I may have ruined it for myself by trying to go for both of the achievements related to it that make it SIGNIFICANTLY harder.

Overall, It was a great deal of fun and I might come back for a run or two every now and then.

Es un roguelite donde entras a una mina para llenarte de oro, matar bichos y rescatar changos que después te van a vender mejoras en el hud principal, no parece destacar o traer nada nuevo a la mezcla pero tampoco resulta malo, las runs finales terminaban siendo bastante largas de aproximadamente 1h. La historia es que tenes que bajar a buscar unas fichitas que te van a soltar los bosses, cuando conseguís las 5 (No tiene que ser en la misma run) desbloqueas el boss final, le partis la cara a ostias y listo rollean los creditos. Si bien quedan bastantes cosas para hacer, como un boss extra si matas a todos los bosses en una sola run, esta la run diaria, podes hacer runs con debuffos de base, seguir desbloqueando las cosas que te hayan quedado, pero el gameplay tampoco es tan atrapante como para quedarte jugando mucho mas de lo que dura la historia principal. No lo recomiendo como primer Roguelike/Roguelite pero si ya jugaste los mas importantes y no sabes que jugar si te lo recomiendo!

A super generic mine themed roguelite. It's doing a lot of stuff but none of it feels new or creative. You have your generic crafting, your NPC's that provide shops and stuff, your chunky pixel graphics, throwable pick boomerang, and randomly generated mine rooms with secret puzzles. There's also bosses. It takes a lot of the skeleton from Binding of Isaac including run killing items you have to learn to avoid.

Generally speaking this game is so uninspired. It's just a mash up of tired old gaming clichés and does nothing original with them. The first 15 minutes feel like the next 8 hours. I got the gist and moved on.

Pro:
- lots of content
- nice art style and charismatic character designs
- funny dialogue and cute interactions
- unique combination of close and ranged combat
- inventive curse and blessing system

Contra:
- lack of an in-depth ingame tutorial
- close combat is sometimes tough to navigate
- jump mechanics are sluggish and sometimes unresponsive
- no information about the map creation algorythms and secrets ingame
- central gaming loop never really evolves
- too hard in the beginning, too easy towards the end
- badly designed final boss (that punishes you for playing the game in a particular way)

Magic Moment: Finding out that just getting to end of the dungeon is not the actual end of the game - which can be a negative and a positive, depending on your style of play.

Verdict: In the era of frequent, high quality Roguelikes, Undermine is a good but not great addition to the genre. The central gameplay loop is not particularly satisfactory and the difficulty scale is sadly off, put the curse system is inventive and there is lots of content to be discovered. You should perhaps take a look at it, but one playthrough is certainly enough.

Copy-pasting the definition of "roguelike" [or "roguelite" for anyone who's invested in the distinction] wasn't what I was going to do for a review, even though it was the impression the game gave out before trying it, and it's mostly the prevailing thought after. It feels alright to play, but I couldn't help but think the entire time--as I was reminded of Binding of Isaac or Rogue Legacy or whatever--that I'd rather be playing the obvious influences or discovering new aesthetics or ideas in the space.

Normally, I hate giving up on roguelites before doing everything, but I think I'm already done with this one. I didn't look up exactly how the game played before I bought it, figuring that it being a popular roguelite would be enough for me, but I wasn't expecting a throwback to Rogue Legacy. Can only fight bosses once and beating the game on the starting level is basically impossible, because you have to gain some meta upgrades in order to stand a chance. I liked that playstyle once, in Rogue Legacy, and ever since I've found that games that do this tend to start you off underpowered to the point of boredom and UnderMine is no exception.

In fact, UnderMine is probably the worst I've seen on this front, as it's not even an exaggeration to say that you have to unlock basically the whole game. The item pool has something like 10 items in it to start with, but there's at least a solid hundred in the game. This creates an odd feeling of me just playing a demo for the first 20 hours of game, wondering when I'm going to achieve access to the real game so I can make a real run with the real amount of HP, damage and skills, instead of running a gimped prototype where it's not possible to win. Once that finally happened and I obtained high enough upgrade levels, I beat the game on my first real go and that was that. Now I just feel done with it and like there's nothing left to do, even though I only made on attempt at the "true" roguelite mode where you start over from scratch every time. Back to every single fleabag enemy taking like 5 hits to kill, making the game tedious and boring.

When it's good, UnderMine feels like a cathartic response to roguelite tropes that were very refreshing and I did enjoy the climb, until I got that demo feeling described above, because of those anti-trope design choices. Like, for example, if you've ever felt like it seems like a waste that only tainted rocks can spawn drops in Isaac, UnderMine has you covered by making every rock able to drop stuff and every floor has a guaranteed crawlspace for you to find. Very satisfying design choices for a roguelite veteran, and I found myself just blowing up rocks whenever I had spare bombs even if I didn't need any consumables just for the sake of seeing them drop after years of playing Isaac and blowing up non-tinted rocks to no gain.

This is also the first time I've seen a roguelite combine items, which kind of blew my mind when it happened. It's such a simple thing that now feels like every roguelite should do it. What UnderMine does is simply combine some items if you happen to find both of them; they retain their original power and get some kind of buff from combining. Excellent design choice.

But every time UnderMine impresses me, it also manages to disappoint with the boring meta-progression system and quite a lot of patently unfair rooms. It doesn't help that the developers were clearly obsessed with designing difficulty, but weren't as interested in designing success. What I mean by that is that the item balance is just completely broken. There are so many curses, like at least a hundred, and they're all manner of creative and vary in power level from completely ignorable to utterly devastating, but there are only like a dozen blessings and none of them are exciting and more than a few of them are lame and just take up pool slots. You can easily find a curse that will destroy your run and mood, but there are no items on the positive side that will have that much of an impact. One curse can destroy your run, but one blessing/relic cannot save it. This is exacerbated by the fact that the unlocks are often weak; with a few exceptions, you unlock boring things like "small chance for increased critical hits" that is a boring and uninspiring unlock, and after you've unlocked it, you just made future runs that much harder since now you have to deal with finding that trash item in the item room when it wasn't there before.

Very torn on this game. It's a fun 20 hours as a sort of roguelite campaign game, kind of like Children of Morta, where the goal is to beat a campain through repeated runs, rather than a proper roguelite where the goal is to attempt to win on every run. We need a genre name for these things since it's not exactly the same thing as regular roguelites. UnderMine just isn't very good as a regular roguelite and the game you unlock is a lot less fun.

Undermine is a fun, addictive Roguelike that whilst looking simplistic and easy on the surface, has a really satisfying difficulty curve and depth of mechanics.

My biggest issue with the game was that to stand a chance against the later bosses, you can't really use the skip mechanic they give you to move to each of the floors, as you will be way more underpowered than if you start each run fresh.

Roguelikes are all about hitting brick walls; powering up and coming back stronger, to get further and further. Unfortunately the powerups take a long time to earn, and are only marginal improvements, meaning that the brick wall still takes forever to get to, and then lays the smackdown on you over and over.

I ended up shelving because I didn't want to spend any more time on the loop; which being part of the roguelike genre is an indictment in itself.

Buena cantidad de objetos y combinaciones de estos mismos
La historia sin mas, como si no estuviera
Existencia de maldiciones que aumentan la dificultad del juego
Compañeros que te ayudan de diferentes formas (te curan, mas oro, mas daño, etc...)
Se ve bonito

This game takes some solid mechanical inspiration from The Binding of Isaac in the heavy focus on both passive upgrades as well as bombs and Keys, all while putting a fun miner twist on it. Having a big focus on gold collection and dealing all your damage with a throwable pickaxe. You die, you spend your gold on permanent upgrades for your miner and you go for more, its fun and a good enough loop with and cute story and just enough to keep me coming back for more.

When I first started this one I was pretty impressed. I thought this would be the first roguelite to challenge Gungeon for my favorite. But it kinda lost some steam. Runs feel a little too smart, especially since you just have the same pick-axe based moveset without many ways to change that. Then also, upgrades are nice, but it takes forever to get one, so it’s not satisfying like it should be. Still a good game for sure, but I guess just didn’t live up to the expectations I had based on first impression

A este juego no le falta mimo ni cariño, no he jugado muchísimo para el tipo de juego que es, así que no se si es larguísimo, pero por el precio que tiene, si te lo estás pensando te lo recomiendo.

Cuentas con muchas mejoras para ir avanzando poco a poco, cada vez llegas un poco más lejos y cada vez te engancha un poco más. Descubres nuevos personajes que puedes ir salvando que a su vez te dan más alternativas para las runs y más mejoras.

El estudio es muy pequeñito, son dos personas y la verdad es que todo funciona muy bien y todo es muy bonito.