Now through August 5, Steam is throwing a Tower Defense Fest, celebrating the diversity of a genre that might just make you think of playing Kingdom Rush on your phone, but actually has a lot more to offer. Case in point: Dome Keeper, a 2022 indie hit that blends defense with mining as you control a lone engineer digging for valuable resources as you protect your dome-covered base from monsters. Sure, it may be stretching the definition of tower defense a bit, given that there are no actual towers involved, but with a huge Steam discount and an equally massive new update, why waste time quibbling with definitions when you could be playing it instead?
In each round of Dome Keeper, you land on a new planet crawling with monsters that bear a pathological hatred of domes, which is unfortunate for your domed base. Your mission is to retrieve an artifact buried deep underground before your base is destroyed, gathering up underground resources to upgrade your fortress along the way. And since your base is under frequent attack by all manner of creatures trying to destroy it by land and air, you need to be ready at any moment to head back above ground to defend the dome with lasers, bombs, and comically huge swords. Since launch, Dome Keeper has captured the perfect “one more round” feeling that keeps players (by which I mean me) coming back for run after run aiming for a better score.
A variety of gadgets to extract resources and fight off monsters, as well as multiple characters with their own abilities, keep Dome Keeper fresh with repeated plays. Last week, it got its biggest update yet, dubbed A Keeper’s Duty, which adds more tools to use on your mission as well as a whole new game mode. Now, players can take on guild assignments, which put challenging modifiers on your run, ranging from planets with only projectile-launching foes to levels with reversed gravity. That means there’s even more variety to keep each run feeling like a new experience, and most of the new conditions feel far more substantial than what was there before, forcing you to completely change the way you play.
As a reward for completing guild assignments, you’ll earn badges that you can trade for permanent perks that affect all future runs in any game mode. Like the assignments themselves, these upgrades prevent Dome Keeper from feeling stale as you play over and over — which is more than welcome since it’s an incredibly hard game to put down once you’ve started it.
What makes Dome Keeper so compelling is that digging through dirt for resources is just as much fun as defending your base from attackers. Like in SteamWorld Dig, you tunnel through increasingly tough rock layers to extract valuable items to spend on upgrades. But just as you can enhance your dome’s strength and add more ways to keep the base safe, you can build an entire automated mine underground as well. In addition to upgrades that let you dig and move faster, you can construct drones to carry gems to the surface for you — and most importantly, you can hire Drillbert.
Drillbert is an adorable dinosaur with a drill for a nose. You can buy Drillbert as an upgrade, at which point they live in your mine, automatically tunneling through rock as long as you stop by once in a while to give them a pat on the head and keep them on track. Drillbert is not the most effective upgrade in the game by a long shot, but I buy one every time because I love Drillbert. Who wouldn’t want a drill-faced friend to keep them company during long mining sessions? So I was thrilled to see that among the upgrades added with A Keeper’s Duty is one that lets you recruit not just one but three Drillberts to tunnel aimlessly alongside you. Honestly, that would be enough to get me to play the update if I didn’t want to already.
If you want a Drillbert of your own (or, you know, to play the game that Drillbert is just a small part of), there’s no better time than now. During the Steam Tower Defense Sale, Dome Keeper is a steal at just $7.19 until August 5.
