Veinrider is a chameleon in some ways. It is an incremental, one-button arcade game, but after the first 15 minutes, it hardly ever feels like one. It is a game that morphs into a succinct, boss-rush-adjacent sci-fi Flappy Bird that is far more fun and engaging than I expected it to be.
Veinrider puts the player in charge of a spaceship in a giant square map. You’ll auto-fly forward with limited health and fuel down a vein of the map, aka a tunnel, that’s flanked by terrain. Press the button to lift the ship. Press nothing to nose-dive. Scattered around the vein are crystals to collect, and these crystals are your first type of upgrade currency. Upgrading your ship, or making the world around you less damaging, allows you to start crashing into terrain and break into the veins above and below you. Different veins, like layers of the Earth, contain different crystals to collect as your skill tree expands. At this point, the game morphs into a boss rush.
Each vein has multiple bosses based on elements. Bosses have their own attack patterns, and if you switch between veins at certain times, they can also merge into hybrid bosses, too. If you aren’t dodging their attacks, you’ll be using passive abilities or deflection tactics to kill bosses off with lightning attacks or terrain drills. You’ll be busy, because you’ll also need to be collecting different currency types to make your ship go further on fuel, and blast through different vein walls to reach the next cave. The goal is to escape the map, but that’ll take getting through some giant walls, surviving bosses, and steering the ship to success. Anomalies can add bonus problems on certain runs, like increasing the boss count or a meteor shower. That’s where the giant skill tree will help you absorb damage and dish out damage to survive.
I enjoyed the discovery element of Veinrider. Dive low, and you’ll hit lava, which requires heat-resistant upgrades in its own mini skill tree. Rise up, and you’ll decompress and require ship strengthening to stay in space to blast meteorites and collect rarer currency types. Again, these areas have bosses, too, and you might be carrying a lot of crystals or meteorites and be weighed down, which turns your ship into a sluggish brute. It’s varied, fun, engaging, very active, and feels like a boss-rush runner game rather than an incremental. The final phase of the game does require everything pretty much unlocked to escape the map. The incremental nature of the game slips back in for its finale, but at a tight 3 hours, it didn’t feel too burdensome. My only other complaint is that whenever I start the game, the first time it always crashes. This happened on the demo, and it happens on the main game. It’s perfectly fine on a second go around, but it’s a strange issue.
Veinrider is more than the sum of its simple premise because it crams lots of things into a compact space and doesn’t drag it out. If you like runner games or active incrementals that require skill to win at, consider this little gem. Surprisingly decent fun!
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