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Dome Keeper is a tricky game to evaluate. It lives somewhere between the flash game Motherload and Terraria, with a bit of tower defense built in.
Dome Keeper lands you in an alien environment and asks you to recover a relic beneath the surface. You mine out the planet, while monsters on the surface threaten to break through your dome and end your ambitions at periodic intervals. Each run varies in length depending on the size of map, but is usually between 20 and 60 minutes. If you succeed, you get the opportunity to unlock new options for your character, base, and environment (even an option to disable the tower defense portion entirely for some reason, which turns the game into an incredibly boring mining clone – so don’t do that).
On the one hand, I was expecting a bit more story for the $18 asking price and it turned out to just be a really well-polished flash game. On the other hand, it’s an incredibly well-polished flash game (in feel – this is not actually a flash game). There’s quite a bit of unlockable content (all of which is well-thought out and adds to the wonderful atmosphere), which is slowly revealed as you play, essentially (and possibly literally) increasing the size of the game each time you finish a run.
The pacing is somehow perfect – just enough time each cycle to do a bit of mining beneath the surface to find some precious resources, but the ticking clock is short enough that it never feels like you have quite enough time to do everything you want. With each wave of creatures getting stronger and each layer of rock becoming harder to dig through, you feel constantly on edge as you inch closer to the prize.
That being said, I’m still left having finished my time wondering exactly what I was accomplishing – there’s no overarching goal to work towards (at least in my few hours of play), and while each run really is fun, it feels somehow empty without an overarching goal in mind (other than perhaps beating the final wave legitimately, which only results in a steam achievement – no special in-game unlockables). Even in FTL, there’s a sense of getting to see new events (admittedly, there is a sliver of that here in terms of enemy variety) or unlocking new ships.
I can’t in good conscience put Dome Keeper in anything other than Tier One. It’s one of those games I wouldn’t ever feel bad about playing, and I’m sure each time I played I would enjoy myself. It just feels as if it’s missing either a bit more variety in terms of run goals or something to work towards other than new unlockable game features.