ITER-8 Review

ITER-8 is a game combining mining and tower defence into a roguelite package, developed by fluckyMachine and published by Fireshine Games. This caught my eye when I was checking out what games were available to review, so I decided, why not? Let’s see if it's worth selling my life to the ITER Corporation.

You play as ITER Employee #8, who is given a very simple goal: Mine the Pillar. Why? Um… resources, I guess? There is something the ITER Corporation wants, but what it is, you’ll have to figure out yourself, either through successful mining operations or through the many messages previous employees have left. It’s fairly interesting, and the visuals have this air of mystery to everything. Even the corporate offices make you question what you’re really here for.

Don't forget, you're here forever.

As for the graphics, it’s very brutalist with hard edges and hard shapes everywhere. It’s accented by a variety of different coloured lights that put emphasis on the more important elements of the screen, and the many enemies you’ll face are simply shadows with red lights, only letting you imagine what extra details they may have. I quite liked that some of the UI is diegetic, indicating the health of your base and how many charges you need for your secondary weapon.

But enough about that, let's get into the gameplay. The first thing you should do at the start of every run is to get onto your Drill Ship and start mining the voxels out of the Pillar. Some blocks will contain a special ore called Uranite, which you’ll need to drag back to base in order to spend on upgrades on your Drill Ship, home base, and operator. You’re going to need a lot of it if you want any hope of completing a run. Honestly, it’s a fairly relaxing time where I could just blast cubes, and going back to base isn’t that big of a problem, as you can uncover fast travel points that’ll hasten the trip back.

Let's make some credits!

Eventually, you’ll find areas that will allow you to step outside your ship, where you’ll need to guide beams of light to a crystal. Do it successfully, and you’ll earn yourself an upgrade or a new skill for your Drill Ship to make mining a lot faster. I kinda disliked this part, mainly due to the camera. It’s not far enough away to see everything, and the edges of the screen are blurred for whatever reason. Still, they weren’t too bad to solve, and it's the only place you’ll get Data cubes to mine that are required to purchase the more powerful upgrades.

But if you think it’s just going to be a peaceful mining adventure, you’re gonna regret those words soon enough. You are on a time limit that is constantly ticking down, and once it’s up, a wave of enemies will appear to attack your base. You’d better finish up what you started and haul your buns back to base.

Oh, eldrich horrors comprehension. What a great Monday.

You do have a gun that will allow you to defend the base, but it’s not the most powerful, and the longer it shoots, the more inaccurate your bullets become. You can set up turrets, towers, and barricades to help deal with these dastardly invaders, and upgrade them in order to deal with the tougher enemies that will spawn the higher you go. However, you can’t purchase them outright. Instead, you’ll have to find these sentries in the Pillar and drag them back to base, where you’ll need to choose which one you’ll want. That means you won’t always get what you need and must deal with what you get.

Defending your base is a fairly interesting way to break up all the mining and puzzles, and you can’t become too strong too early due to limiting the available resources. You can’t move to the next biome without beating the boss fight, and they can be challenging if you aren’t prepared, especially when you need to deal with the current weather. Storms and blizzards can affect your defences and the enemy waves, which I admit I didn’t notice all too much. However, there is one type of weather that often occurs at boss fights, which disables your Defence terminal, meaning you can’t place or upgrade your defences, so you can’t prepare as much as you’d like. Still, it is quite fun to destroy stuff and manage the chaos of the waves.

Your future replacement.

Unfortunately, success isn’t a guarantee and failure is a natural part of the process… as long as it benefits the ITER Corporation. Don’t worry if you die, as you’ll be replaced by an equally expendable employee who will pick up where you left off at a different Pillar. Not only that, you can choose to purchase permanent upgrades, new job classes, and better equipment using all the credits you made by destroying voxels to ensure that they last slightly longer, such as equipping their base with missiles and an EMP. Or you can splurge on some decorations to make your very short tenure a little more comfortable.

I actually beat a run on my first try, which was a little bit of a shock, but that did give me access to harder difficulties that offered more credits in exchange for harder enemies. And hey, it’s not like I was even close to being done.

This is suppose to be how you set up your defences.

That being said, ITER-8 isn’t perfect, at least in the state it’s in at the time of writing. The game did stutter significantly at some points, especially when it came to destroying tons of blocks at once. There are also some bugs that need to be ironed out. Sometimes the effects go a little too crazy, such as an infinitely repeating explosion that shook the Pillar like a really long earthquake (and remember, a good part of the UI is diegetic) or a light so bright it covers half the screen. It actually ruined my first run’s ending because I couldn’t see what the heck was going on.

Overall, I think ITER-8 is an intriguing roguelite that fans of the genre should try out at least. While I don’t quite know what I’m working towards with all these runs, the gameplay is fun enough to keep me determined to see it to the end. Plus, the achievements don’t seem too bad either. I look forward to playing more.