Day 217 - DUSTRANGER
Idle Clicker, Bangers, Driving ·
Skeeter’s Take:
One of my favorite things about this project is stumbling upon something great. I never knew I needed a gacha-customizable-roomba dust collecting game in my life, but here we are.
DUSTRANGER pretty much had me hooked from the start. The whole idea is you customize a Roomba with different parts and upgrades and then go and collect dust with it. It sort of reminds me of those Japanese toy racing cars you could upgrade with all sorts of parts:
Just seeing a picture of the motors for these things brought back a wave of nostalgia.
The Roomba upgrades feel very similar.
There are a bunch of different upgrades, things like wider vacuum size, motor upgrades, battery upgrades, etc. You get these upgrades by playing the gatch machines:
There are three different tiers of gacha machines, the highest cost giving the best upgrades. I’ll be real, I’m a sucker for gacha mechanics as long as they feel fair and don’t cost real money (other than what you spent on the game, which in this case was FREE).
You earn cash by sucking up dust with your Roomba in one of two different levels. I’ve been burying the gameplay lede intentionally because I wanted to pause to tell you about my first experience with said gameplay.
The game gives you some starter money, and I had rolled a random bumper and a battery upgrade and I was feeling ready to rock and roll.
I press “play level A” and load into the game:
I press W on my keyboard and the Roomba starts moving forward. I try to press “A” and “D” to move the Roomba left and right. It does not move. It keeps driving. I switch my right hand to the arrow keys, but the Roomba doesn’t respond. It keeps on its course, headed straight for the wall. I start panicking and smacking every key on my keyboard. I make the game fullscreen. The Roomba doesn’t respond. It runs into the wall.
And turns itself around.
In all the excitement, I had somehow forgot what a Roomba’s whole shtick is - it drives it’s fucking self!
I take my hands off my keyboard and cheer as my little cherry red Roomba hot rods around the room sucking up dust. I pump my fist as the Roomba bounces off the wall and lines itself up to the perfect straight shot across the room to the other wall. I cry in agony as my Roomba takes a teleporter to the top of the counter and falls into the sink to spend the rest of the round bouncing between the walls of the sink and the plates that had fallen on its head. I watch as my Roomba drains its last of its battery and wastes away, freeing itself from the sink hell it had driven itself into.
And I was in love with this game from that moment on.
I did notice something peculiar on the end screen, though. Something that said “did 0 damage to boss!”
Excuse me? There’s a BOSS??!
And sure enough, there is!
I’m really not sure how I didn’t see him the first time. He’s huge, roars occasionally, and drops these little Miyazaki dust spirits:
You do damage to the boss by running into him. The most I’ve brought him down to so far has been about 96% HP.
Hell, the boss even has his own camera angle. I really should have noticed.
There are a ton of camera angles worked into the game, which is good, because you’ll spend most of the time watching your Roomba vroom around since that is the gameplay. There’s even a slick little isometric view, for those more Top-Down inclined.
I also noticed these little battery pick-ups that were out of reach all over the place:
I theorized that there was probably some sort of upgrade that would allow me to get up there.
Sure enough, I saved enough money to roll the $250 cost gacha and dropped JUMP.
And Jump rules. I don’t need to explain jump, but it did let me reach those batteries which extended the run. By this point, I had quite a few upgrades and this raised two new challenges.
The first being runs were starting to take a while, but the dev graciously added a fast mode button on the right hand side and that cuts things down a lot once you have battery upgrades.
The other challenge is I was out of slots on my Roomba. I thought I was being clever when I removed my bumper so I could keep my wide vacuum, dust recycler, and jump. My Roomba ended up just sliding against the wall until the game’s unstick feature would kick in and turn me around.
Turns out you don’t need a bumper, but you need a bumper.
There are achievements you can unlock and receive AP points to put towards size upgrades, dust respawn rate, and dust point multiplier.
Last thing I want to mention is the music on level 2 sounds like it could fit right at home on a Lego Racer track.
I’m still doing runs while I write this review. Will report if I’m able to take the boss down.
UPDATE I HAVE A CANNON AND AN ENEMY STEERING MODULE WE ARE SO IN IT:
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE I DID IT!!
The more I think about DUSTRANGER, the more I think it is almost an idle-clicker game. Just ironically sans the clicking aspect. You get upgrades which make your money collecting more efficient, and then use those upgrades to get more money. And you just sit and watch as the numbers go up. Just an observation.
I do have some bad news, however. I was really hoping that this was a demo for an upcoming game, or an early version of something the dev is working on.
Damn. I love what is here, but I think there is so much potential. I’m sad to see it never got finished, but 2023 isn’t that far away. Dustranger_dev, I hope you are still working on this. I love it. It’s a ton of fun and a unique idea. I would pay money for a full version of this game 100%.
Recommend: Yes, absolutely. It’s a certified “Watch-Something-On-My-Other-Monitor” (WSOMOM) Classic!
Replay Percentage Chance: 5% chance to crit
Time Played: 2.5 hours
EDIT: I unlocked everything in the game and completed all the achievements:
I liked it.
Sam’s Take:
Why am I just now at 11:40pm reviewing Dustranger?
Because I spent my entire evening playing Dustranger.
There are so many things to love about this game, from the way the music changes when you enter a new menu, to the unnecessary camera angles during the idle portion of the game. Even watching your upgrades ram themselves into your roomba at the start of a round. The whole thing is just an audio-visual feast with a bit of idle chill. I want this dev to finish this game, add some maps, a bunch of new power ups, maybe a new base roomba, so I’m going to issue an ultimatum.
Dustranger_dev, if you don’t finish this game, I’m stealing it. I’m copying your entire idea and making millions. You’ll cry to everyone you know “look look! I made this game first! That Sam guy copied me”, but I’ll already be too large, your cries will fall on deaf ears. I will be the Gaming God, and you will, ironically, be nothing but dust.
So you should finish the game.
Recommend: YES GOD YES
Replay Percentage Chance: 50%
Time Played: 2 Hours
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