While I tend to have a soft spot in my heart for pretty well all things roguelike, that doesn’t prevent me from being critical of games in that vein that fail to meet their potential. What I’ve always tended to appreciate about titles that take on the roguelike challenge, is that ideally their runs will feel familiar but somehow fresh because of creative power-up choices, transformative meta progression, or just some wild variability baked into the design. Unfortunately, when those vibes aren’t clicking there can be trouble, and I think EcoGnomix falls into that trap.

There’s no doubt that this is an odd hybrid of styles, mixing together what feels like a city builder when you’re operating above ground, and a bit of an unusual strategy game when you’re working underneath it. Each sort of feeds the other, with the resources and rewards you collect on each run helping to unlock new buildings to construct, new areas to explore, new units, and new skills as well. Those then enable you to have a leg up on your next run, where you’ll have to balance the desire to collect as many resources as you can with ensuring you’re keeping up your supply of meat that will keep the hungry bats in the caves from attacking your crew and ending the run.

To a degree, I do think this formula works well enough, but while there’s a challenge to be had here I tended to feel too constrained most of the time to really enjoy myself. It almost played out more like a puzzle game at times rather than strategy, since the spots you typically have to choose from for placing your various gnome units are quite limited. The effect of this, more often than not, was a feeling that your task was to pick the optimum unit types and placements for each level and run rather than having the space and latitude to experiment with different strategies. The more you unlock, the more opportunities you do begin to have, but the dungeon runs never really break through to feeling rewarding. Similarly, on the surface, your progression for many of the buildings feels pretty well dictated by the order you’ll acquire different resources, so again it feels less like you’re building a grand strategy for success and more like you’re just moving in a somewhat linear progression path.

None of this necessarily makes it a bad game, it just feels like there are missed opportunities for making it more interesting and engaging for the player. The roguelike formula only feels somewhat half-heartedly applied, providing some variability being blended into the mix, but lacking in the depth of flavor I’ve come to expect from these titles. If you’re looking for something a bit more light and charming though, it may work for you.