Codename: Ocean Keeper

• Genre: Action
• Spoiler Free Review: Yes.
• Time Played: 15-20 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's about right.
• Did I cry: No.
• Soundtrack: It has some good tracks but nothing I'm going to seek out to listen to on it's own.
• Why I played: It looked cool, had a spider mech.
• Jank: The Switch version is definitely a little janky and just decides to randomly crash. I might have finished the game a bit sooner if not for that.
• Difficulty: It's got rougelite progression where you get upgrades as you play and get further and as you get more upgrades, it's not too difficult.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Pleased enough.
• Recommend to others: I wouldn't exactly go out of my way. It's a perfectly serviceable game and entertained me, similar games that this one may have taken inspiration from like... Dome Keeper and Wall World might be more worth it to some.
  

Hey, finally played a game made in the past decade this year. At first it was just kind of a filler game because I wasn't sure what to play and was like "oh I got that, let me check that out" and ended up getting hooked on the gameplay loop.

Codename: Ocean Keeper, also known as Ocean Keeper: Dome Survivor on Steam is almost definitely inspired by the above mentioned games. I've only played Wall World, but I've also seen Dome Keeper, and I've seen a couple other similar games, but this one is pretty new by comparison. It has a cool mech though and a decent enough amount of options for weapons and upgrades that I opted to sink my time into this one.

You have a minute and a half between waves of enemies that are progressively more deadly, during which you need to find a mine, do some mining, use minerals to upgrade your stuff so you can survive more waves of enemies. Pretty simple. There are some light puzzle areas that are story related and a little bit of the random upgrades per run mechanic, but both are pretty much the lightest they could be without not existing. I would have liked to have seen larger timers or a timer pause so they could maybe do more intricate or just more of the little puzzle areas, but there are only a handful of them.