Drill Core Review:
Mining, Missiles, and Management

There’s something inherently satisfying about digging. Maybe it’s being raised on stories of pirates and paleontologists looking for treasure on secrets. Maybe it’s just the fact that there’s something wonderful about seeing cause and effect so plainly, caused by the fruits of your own labor; stick shovel in ground, see ground get moved. Jacob Geller recently just did a half hour video on the joy of digging a hole, and… yes, we could always bring up that song.

Regardless of why, digging, or mining, is a really easy way to show off progress in video games. Just go back to Dig Dug from 1982, where it was one of the biggest arcade game sellers made. If a game can get you to feel as if you are making progress, that you are making a tangible difference to the game itself, you can hook someone. This is where Drill Core comes in and asks the deeper questions. Questions like, “What if we added giant tunnel worms to the mix?” and “What if we made the player also deal with constant aerial monster invasions too?” You can always dig a little deeper, sure… but how many miners are you willing to sacrifice to eke out a little more efficiency or a little more money?

I won’t hide my intentions with this review: Drill Core is a good game, pulling you in with an addictive premise, pleasing roguelike choices, and satisfying meta-progression. The real question for me is if all of these elements come together in a way that makes this game worth your money and makes you as a player want to come back for more.

Everyone Tells You To Diggy Diggy Hole… But No One Asks WHY You Diggy Diggy Hole

The premise of Drill Core lies somewhere between a genuine compelling concept and raw corporate greed. The game’s intro is a retro-future mash up explaining how many planets are too hot or cold or dangerous, and the company’s objective is to, well, drill towards the center of the planet and launch a reactor into it that will scientifically/magically heat up/cool down/stabilize the planet itself, making sure everyone lives a better life.

And if you pick up a boat load of expensive ore along the way and help them become the most profitable company in the galaxy? Well, everyone wins!

This premise maps really well into game mechanics, giving you both a sense of progress and a reason to tempt you to be incredibly greedy. You start out most games with a few miners, a collector, and a guard on a huge digging platform. After initially digging 50 meters down, you can send down your crew into the earth to dig out block after block looking for resources. There are three major ones: iron, swarmlit, and good old coal. All are important, but the real objective is to collect enough coal (6 pieces) to trigger your platform to dig deeper, 50 meters at a time.

Once you have dug the platform to get deep enough, you can trigger the giant core of energy to get hurled deeper into the planet’s mantle, triggering some mass chain reaction and your crew can home totally safe and without any problems. The planet is fixed up, you get to go home, and the company makes a boatload of money.

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The digging up resources is very fun, urging you to keep upgrading your platform to become more efficient. On the platform itself you can construct buildings, such as factories that auto-generate some resources, worker barracks so you can hire more miners and collectors, and labs to increase your ability to blast through rock faster or improve your employees directly. You unlock more building options as the roguelike elements make themselves known; giant green barrels that let you start building more specialized equipment can be found, giving you access to active action buttons like auto-mining drills, defensive rocket batteries, and… reincarnation machines?

Wait a second, why would we need-

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that each planet you are on naturally comes crawling with monsters and pitfalls. Drill Core has a day-and-night cycle, where during the day things are relatively safe. In your first few cavernous planets, you’ll start to notice some problems. Some of the blocks in the ground will occasionally start to hatch monsters. You have a guard to start and it can easily take care of one creature at a time, but you realize that now there’s a mini-game to resource acquisition. Do you keep trying to find the most efficient way to dig out the ore for your collectors, or do you take time away from that to silence threats before they overwhelm you?

This one threat alone begins to compounds the complexity as more styles of trap reveal themselves. You can find lava rocks that explode out in a particular direction, meaning you should be careful to dig to a less dangerous side. There are warp rifts that occasionally will ‘help’ you dig. Any ore they pick up is absorbed into their core so you can still acquire it, but if a warp rift closes and you have anyone on that particular square, it’s an instant KO. Sure, you can hire more workers, but that costs resources, and you need those resources to create new buildings, upgrade technology, and build defenses too.

Which brings us to nighttime, where Drill Core shifts into tower defense. I absolutely love Core Keeper, a lonely game about being the sole survivor on a hostile world, attempting to dig resources in order to escape. When night approaches, you hear an alarm, and you better get back up to your base, your dome, and manually control the defenses. It’s tense and keeps you wanting to play through the game loop.

Here, Drill Core takes that same game loop and approaches it slightly differently, again placing you in the foreman position that’s more like a real time strategy game. Monsters descend from above, but you use resources to set up turrets strategically along the mineshaft walls. You can discover buildings that work as watchtowers on your platform, automatically firing off salvos of missiles or lasers on cooldown, or you can create buildings that give you access to powerful direct-control missile batteries and other tricks. Creating little strategies to bottleneck enemies or target the right ones can be make-or-break moments at higher difficulties.

But that’s not where the real challenge is here. No, it’s balancing defense with capitalism. You see, you can keep digging during nighttime. In many ways, it’s a great way to optimize your time, since every night that passes means the monsters get stronger. The faster you dig deeper into the center of the earth, the quicker you are to victory. However, the planet has these wonderful monsters called “terrabors”. If you’ve seen or heard of Dune, you can get the idea real quick. They move from one side of the screen to the other, and while the attacks are telegraphed, one of your crew getting touched by their face is pretty much instant death.

I’ve had a few runs ended prematurely due to hubris. I thought I had it all under control, and kept optimizing and spending all my ore on upgrades. Suddenly, a giant worm attacked while I was busy fighting off the sky spiders, and now I had no collectors left, losing 6 crew at once. I had no extra ore to hire more, putting me into a death spiral and utter panic.

Roguelike Elements To Keep You Digging On The Company Dime

If you couldn’t already tell, the name of the game in Drill Core is controlling chaos. The more workers you have, the harder it is to keep track of if someone has accidentally started mining next to a rockfall pit. The longer you play a round, the more varied threats start to pile on top of each other. Just as I lost the game due to taking my eye off the mining operations, I’ve lost by getting tunnel vision for unlocking digging tech upgrades that I forgot to keep upgrading my turrets, and then get demolished from above. It’s a lot.

And, fortunately for us all, there’s even more to take into consideration thanks to the roguelike elements sprinkled all throughout the game.

First off, you have the classic “Here are three upgrades, please choose one” changes that happen mid-run. When you find those green technology barrels, they can give you some static buffs such as turret range or more max workers. They also let you unlock the buildings and turrets you put onto your platform, meaning you have to make the most out of your situation. You might have been really hoping for some rocket turrets, but will some energy lasers suffice for now?

Again, these choices get more complicated the more you play the game. When you start a run, you can choose some optional ‘qualifications’, sub objectives like ‘have 10 turrets by the end of the game’ or ‘don’t lose a single worker’. Complete it, and it adds more buildings to the variety already unlocked. It's a great way to keep individual runs feeling interesting, trying to balance yet another goal on top of sheer acquisition. On top of all of this, every time you complete a level, you gain exp, which can go into various company ‘departments’, unlocking more bizarre weaponry and tools.

These aren’t the only variables. Every time you beat a level, you unlock the next difficulty higher. You also unlock two other planet types - frozen and jungle - each taking the formula and twisting it. On frozen worlds, monsters have shields you have to break before dealing damage, and icicle blocks in the caves can kill you fast if you don’t carefully excavate them first. On jungle worlds, Terrabors aren’t as big and deadly, but there are multiple, and they are faster, disrupting mining even as the monsters above come in massive swarms, making you shift turret tactics towards higher attack speeds instead of damage.

Fortunately, there’s some meta-progression of technology as well, letting you start future runs with a few more supplies or upgrades than the last time. On top of everything, you can actually choose between three different platform styles entirely, upgrading them independently! You have a classic human mining crew, a dwarven crew that adores explosives and is more elite, and then a zerg-like Swarmlit faction, which frees up some of your economy while also having to manage how to grow enough larvae to keep making more workers and buildings.

Finally, you’ll notice that every planet you can choose from changes a little each mission. Each planet gives you some sort of temporary buff, but also can make it so workers are more expensive, or days are shorter. Drill Core works hard to take a solid core gameplay loop and give you many different iterations of that loop so you always want to keep coming back for one more run, or one more dig deeper into the earth.

I should know, after putting more than 40 hours into it, and having multiple nights of ‘I’ll play for an hour’ and then suddenly finding out it's 2 am.

The Daily Grind

This last point is sadly going to dovetail into the negative part of this review, and that’s how sometimes Drill Core feels like it can outstay its welcome. There’s a fine line between a game that feels addictive in a way that’s exciting and a game that’s addictive in a way that feels taxing. Again, I have played this game for somewhere between 44-50 hours, and have truly enjoyed my time. With that being said, I feel as though there is something to the pacing that could still be tweaked.

Simply put, the basic game loop doesn’t vary much. You dig as fast as you can to find just enough resources to get to the next level. For most difficulties, you just need to repeat this cycle three or so times, and you win, getting down between 150 meters and 250 meters. You can keep going, as there are achievements and challenges that reward you with a ton of extra meta currency to upgrade your platform with when you do. As your platform becomes a harvesting machine, it gets easier to scrape out each 50 meter zone almost entirely before digging deeper.

The game loop being repetitive isn’t a problem if you like the game loop. However, once you get past a particular tipping point in a run, you aren’t feeling that pressure as deeply. Drill Core is at its best in that first few levels. You are building up your ability to mine, balancing it with building defenses, and trying to hire more people. Each time you lose someone, it hurts badly. Those first opening waves of enemies are a skill check in how you balance your administrative skills. As you become less rushed, you feel the urge to mine every level in its entirety, which can pad the time of a run.

In my attempt to get the “1000 meters deep” achievement, I ended up having a run last several hours. Yes, there is a ‘speed up’ button, but use at your own peril for losing track of all the dangers. I can’t even imagine how long it would take to go for the ‘survive 100 days’ challenges, as digging 2-3x the distance needed to beat the level had only taken 30 or so in-game days.

The other issue I think some people might have is frustration over not being able to directly control your crew. This isn’t an RTS where you micromanage each character: guards rush to problems, collectors… collect, and miners go blow up rocks. You highlight what rocks you want blown up and in what priority, and you can earmark some resources as more important, but they path around the map on their own. You can tell them to retreat where they dart back to the surface, but it’s a mad-dash, and I’ve seen many a worker get eaten trying to outrace a terrabor.

To summarize the negatives: sometimes you will wish you had more direct control of your minions, and the pacing can feel a bit strange. Some players are going to react to this game as being a grind, while others might absolutely love its tempo. Just keep in mind that a run of Drill Core might last longer than some other roguelike styled games before you buy.

Drill Core Will Make You Yearn For the Mines

I think Drill Core is a great game. I’ve put in over 45 hours into it, and made it to the highest difficulty levels before trailing off. That’s a ton of fun for a game that sells at about $20 dollars, and I don’t regret my time with it at all. There are some players that might tag out quicker than that, once they hit difficulty 5, but there’s a ton of good content to enjoy even if you play a little less than me.

The devs have already said there’s going to be a big free content update coming this winter, and I’ll gladly jump on for a few more rounds when that happens. The only caveat against me recommending this game wholesale is that the mix of genres might not be for everyone. For those who want a game that gives you more direct control and action, you’d be better off with games like Risk of Rain or Dome Keeper. For those who want a more thoughtful approach to roguelikes, you have Slay The Spire and turn-based card games.

Personally, I really enjoy the mix of management/simulation with the sense of tower defense and roguelike sensibilities. It’s hit a sweet spot between giving me a sense of pressure while also still giving me time to plan out my next move. If future patches give a little more content to vary the runs and they rebalance the pacing just a touch, I can see playing this one for years to come.

Check out Drill Core on its store page and see for yourself. It’s affordable, and tinyBuild games often go on sale during the holidays. I hope the genre mash up is one you appreciate as much as I do, and I’ll see you in the mines, terrabors and all.