Wall World 2

Back into the Wall, this time through a hub

Wall World 2 is developer and publisher Alawar's sequel to 2023's mining roguelite Wall World, released 11 November 2025 for Windows and macOS. Players once again climb inside a robospider and descend into the World Wall, an endless, procedurally generated vertical mine riddled with monsters, lost technology and valuable resources, upgrading both robospider and exosuit as they push deeper in search of answers about what the Wall actually is. The sequel's biggest structural change sits above ground: a new sphere city hub now connects expeditions, letting players meet characters, spend earned currency, and customize their gear between runs, replacing the original's single, unbroken climb with a mission-based loop of short expeditions bookended by trips home.

More Wall, more city, more reasons for returning fans to dig back in

The strongest thread of praise across Wall World 2's review corpus comes from players willing to meet its expanded scope on its own terms. One detailed review calls it "bigger, better and all-around an upgrade to WW1," specifically crediting the new city hub and its NPCs for giving players somewhere meaningful to spend their earnings between runs. Multiple reviewers independently praise the deeper meta progression on offer, with one noting the sequel "offers way, way more meta progression than the first," and another describing genuine excitement discovering new mining tools and combat options compared to the original. New enemies now populating the mines themselves, absent for long stretches in the first game, draw their own specific credit, alongside visual presentation reviewers repeatedly single out as "insanely cool" and a clear step up in art quality from Wall World's already well-regarded look.

A mission structure reviewers say betrays the original's best idea

Set against that praise, the single most dominant and heavily repeated complaint across Wall World 2's negative reviews concerns its fundamental restructuring of the original's core loop. One of the corpus's most heavily upvoted negative reviews lays the criticism out precisely: the sequel "abandons the massive level you can spend hours climbing, and instead has a 'missions' system, where you choose a mission to go on, complete it, and go back to a hub," a structure the reviewer says makes the game "very grindy" despite technically extending its length. A separate detailed review frames the same complaint even more bluntly, describing Wall World 2 as "only" an instanced, mission-based currency treadmill with none of the first game's "open world" appeal, while another reviewer states plainly that the sequel "added and subtracted exactly the wrong things," citing the loss of "the huge mysterious open world" as the change they feel most acutely.

Upgrades that don't stick, and missions that run too long

A further, independently repeated complaint concerns progression mechanics within that new structure. One detailed review describes ending the game "with over a million dust and hundreds of every resource," arguing the incentive to fully explore any given mission "is basically gone" once meaningful upgrades stop carrying forward the way players expect from the genre. A separate reviewer echoes the same frustration about pacing specifically, noting "the XXL maps can take almost an hour to finish," a length several other reviews independently describe as dragging well past what any individual mission's content can sustain. A related, smaller but specific complaint targets the new city hub itself: one detailed review calls the "entire pointless city UI, running back and forth to buy drinks and upgrades" an unnecessary layer of friction that "could have been accomplished in a menu system," directly undercutting one of the sequel's most heavily advertised additions.

A sequel that splits its own fanbase

Reading across Wall World 2's full review corpus, the clearest throughline isn't inconsistent quality so much as a genuine divide in what returning fans wanted from a sequel. Reviewers who approached the game hoping for a straightforward continuation of the first game's open-ended, climb-as-far-as-you-can structure largely describe disappointment, several explicitly recommending newcomers "go play the original game" instead. Reviewers who approached it as a genuinely new take on the formula, willing to accept a mission-based hub structure in exchange for deeper meta progression and a fuller world to inhabit between runs, largely describe real enthusiasm, with one admitting to playing eight hours straight without noticing the time pass. That split explains the Mostly Positive score better than any single feature complaint: Wall World 2 isn't broken so much as built around a different set of priorities than many of its most devoted first-game fans were hoping for.

A publisher betting on scale over a repeat of the original

Alawar's own decision to build Wall World 2 around missions and a persistent hub rather than simply re-running the first game's open climb reads, across the review corpus, as a deliberate bet on giving the sequel more systems to sustain a longer game rather than a straightforward victory lap. That ambition shows up clearly in the additions reviewers credit most: a real hub city with recurring characters, mac support extending the game's reach to a platform the original skipped entirely, and combat encounters inside the mines that push Wall World 2 further toward a full action-roguelite than its more purely exploratory predecessor. The trade-off, based on the corpus's most detailed critical reviews, is that stretching a formula built around one long, satisfying climb into a repeatable mission loop asks a lot of systems, particularly progression and pacing, that were never under the same pressure in the smaller, more contained original. Several reviewers explicitly frame this as understandable ambition that didn't fully land at launch rather than a cynical reworking, with more than one noting genuine goodwill toward Alawar addressing pacing and reward issues in updates following the game's rocky mission-structure reception.

Value

At NZ$17.49, Wall World 2 asks a moderate price for a visually accomplished, mechanically expanded sequel to a well-regarded mining roguelite, and its Mostly Positive score, 1429 positive against 529 negative across 1958 reviews, reflects a review base genuinely split on whether its new mission-based structure improves or undermines the original's appeal. For newcomers or players open to a differently structured sequel with deeper meta progression and a fuller world between runs, Wall World 2 delivers real value; for fans specifically drawn to the first game's open-ended, continuous climb, the current review corpus suggests going in with tempered expectations about how much of that original structure survived the transition.