Drill Core

Honestly, I've hesitated for a long time before buying this game due to mixed reviews. In the end I got it on sale with the DLC, and now I can confidently say I would not mind paying the full price for this. This is a very nice game with lots of content, and it's unfortunate that it didn't get more visibility. Some of the stuff I saw in the negative reviews ended up simply misleading. (For example, claims that the game is "buggy as hell" really made me hesitate before purchase. 17h of gameplay, and I have yet to see a single bug. Not saying that there aren't any, but "buggy as hell"? maybe not). Dwarf platform got a lot of negativity, but when I tried it for myself, I loved it. Etc, etc. UPDATE. After hitting 50h mark, I can't help but say that some of the reviews just genuinely baffle me. "Game is too slow" - and yet I find myself constantly hitting pause because managing a mine very quickly becomes nigh impossible for me otherwise. "You can't complete a run unless RNG stars align" - and yet for me the mine is riddled with tech and buff upgrades, and with rerolls I can always cook a working build. I've just unlocked difficulty 11 and I have yet to lose a single run... Perhaps they don't know that you can select 2 starting technologies (this let's you mitigates any downsides your platform has)? Are we even playing the same game? Oh well. For the would be buyers I'd really suggest trying the game for yourself for 2h and then deciding if you want to keep or to refund. This game seems to be one of those cases where relying solely on reviews isn't enough to decide if this is your cup of tea. As for me, I definitely got my money's worth.

This game just doesn't click for me, it doesn't feel like it has any towerdefense gameplay at all. Its all about managing the mine and maybe 5% going back and building towers. I like to play games in a challenging way, think about how to to play optimaly and get the most out of my situation. You can't do that here without boring yourself to death, the game speed is an issue but the speed up toggle and "fast mode" fix that. The issue instead is that you need to micromanage the mine all-the-time, if you have sped up the time and an enemy spawner "pops up" as they do, when you see it and pause to try and prevent it chances are that you are too late. Because you weren't playing on snail mode. Realistically your options are a) Play slow turtle mode and bore yourself out of your mind while micro managing things and pausing to stop yourself from losing resources. b) Play on fast mode and lose things constantly because you are too slow to react. The micromanagement is not even fun or rewarding, its literaly "a bad thing is going to spawn, I need to tell my guys to destroy it, "a rock is about to spew fire, I need to tell my guys to move", "My drill instructions just go cancelled because it was bedrock behind a rock and now my driller is idle not doing anything, need to right click more stuff". Its not interesting decisionmaking, it just feels like work, I'm not here to work, I'm here to have fun. I guess the players that enjoy this game don't sweat as much about optimising as I do.

I will give a no to this game. I gave it a fair shot, it's too late to refund. IT IS INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS. The entire gameplay loop is to count your miners/haulers every 30 seconds and replace who died. You lose a few every minute. They just keep dying in the mine for no reason. Heading into a lava block or mining a boulder from under it, when there is a better approach. It's insane how fragile and stupid they are. MAJOR ANNOYANCE: END OF DAY RECALL SHOULD BE AUTOMATIC start of day -> all workers go into the mine. It's automatic. end of day -> you have to recall workers manually, clicking a button for 3 seconds. If you forget to recall, most workers die within 10 seconds. Creatures appear at night and eat them. Of course I forget on every other round and *RIP* all my progress. This game should be called RESET SIMULATOR. I've got better things to do with my life than play a game that tries to erase my progress on every round.

The games is a mixture of tower defense and base management. It has a similar vibe as "Ark of Charon". During the day you gather resources via mining and during the night you defend against growing enemy waves. I would give it somewhat a neutral review. The game has a lot of good things - especially considering the price tag - but it also suffers from, what I view, fundamental design flaws. I reached the maximum difficulty and also completed some of the 1% achievements, so I'd say I experienced most of the core game at least. Positives: - The game is fairly easy to understand and play. I didn't have to look for any tutorials or "let's play" to get going. - It has a lot of diversity. You have multiple platforms, cores, specialists, building types, tower types, technologies, distorsions, biomes, mission types ..etc. There is a lot of customisation in both pre-mission and adjustments during mission. - The main loop / core mechanic fits quite well. It can be a bit addictive - which is a mark of a good game - I personally like the aesthetics. Not complex but enough to feel that you are playing a modern game. - I didn't encounter any bugs in 50h of play. Neutral: - I like the idea of progression and upgrades but I dislike the idea of game-changing upgrades. Giving a class of towers 10% more damage is fine. Giving the platform the "Suction ores" ability completly changes your playstyle and you tripple your income from day 1. This makes the upgrade pretty much mandatory but it's pretty far in the tech tree. Negatives: - Probably my biggest complaint would be the extreme micromanagement of workers at night. Generally speaking, you mine during the day and at night you fight. But that's not entirely accurate. Because if you micromanage your workers you can get resources during the night as well. You "just" have to dodge the worms. Which is a very micro-intensive thing to do especially with high worker count. But you lose about 25% income if you don't. This gameplay sucks. You pause every second and reroute X workers. If you mess up you lose the run. High APM should not be a requirement in a colony/tower defense type of game. This is a design flaw. - Workers are just to fragile. When you mine you can unlock a plethora of things that can 1 shot your basic workers even with max upgrades. You just dug up a flamerock? You lost 3 workers. You dug up a boulder? You lost 4 workers. You didn't deny the enemy spawn? Your worker dies before the guards show up to defend. This puts you in a position where you have to dig tile by tile or risk heavy deaths. When you have 30 workers and you have to assign every tile for evey worker it becomes unfun. If you lose 4 workers, your entire income for that day is lost. Especially at high worker count, the cost is pretty significant (one worker is more expensive than the most expensive turret in the game). You spend 95% of the game paused and selecting tiles and 5% running. This is not a good gaming experience. - There are some imabalanced in the game. For example, foundry - which is one of the first buildings - gives you income every turn. The problem is that only the first foundry is worth the cost. All others are a waste of resources as they won't become profitable. This is not complex math. I've seen posts with complains about this in 2024. Yet in 2026 and nothing was done about it. Adjusting some numbers on a basic building is not complicated which makes me believe that there is nobody doing anything about the game balance. Same can be said about other things - like some towers being superior in all scenarios and some being absolute trash. - Your main way of aquiring permanent resources (used in permanent upgrades) is via contracts. The problem is that most contract are to easy and to unrewarding. Even at highest difficulty, I can finish the contracts without buying a single tower (outside of the 2 free ones offered at start). The requirement of completing the mission is to low. So is the reward. So if you want upgrades you end up spamming easy missions basically. The difficult part if at high depths but you never get to that point. There should be contracts that ask the player to go to 1000m (for example) but offer a hefty reward. This would be more engaging gameplay. TLDR Rating: 65 / 100 This could be a 9/10 game with some adjustments but I don't know if anyone works toward that goal.

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Honestly, it's not perfect, and the pure amount of buildings and turrets really often leads to some runs where you either get crushed fast, or you become extremely powerful. But gosh, there is something addicting about this game. Digging cleverly underground Boulder Dash-style, trying to avoid falling rocks and trying to extract as much resources, while playing a normal but fairly unique Turret Defense game on the surface is kind of good. The mixture of genres is real good. It's like part RTS, part Turret Defense, part worker manager kind of thing. Trying to unlock more building types and mixing them together in overpowered combos (or finding/drafting buildings to solve your current problem in the map before you lose) is really fun. There is some joy watching those little bastards mine and gather resources, and you trying your best not to murder them by accident. The unique mission types are meh, I could take it or leave it. But the raw amount of buildings and turrets is really cool. Then you find perks underground, and they've added "disortions" you can find underground if you really wanna make your run wacky (like, double resources but twice-as-tough rocks, for example). It's really awesome. Sometimes I forget about this game, but whenever I return, I end up playing until 5 AM. It's great. I'm playing real slow, approaching difficulty 8 now (out of 10 I think?), but I enjoy doing "contracts" and just unlocking more and more buildings and turrets.

[h2]Gameplay ★★★☆ – Good[/h2] [list] [*] a very unique twist of tower defense, resource management, and harvesting [/list] [h2]Performance ★★★☆ – Good [/h2] [list] [*]No issues. Loading screens are fine. Should be toaster capable [/list] [h2]Value ★★☆☆ 2 – Ok [/h2] [list] [*] My $1=1hr rule is a close one here. While I can see myself playing 20 hrs. I doubt I ever will. [/list] ──────────────────── [h2]Review[/h2] [quote] I enjoyed every moment I played this game outside of using the dwarves. Nothing against the dwarves but they are NOT for me. I really like the multi facet gameplay loop. Harvest while managing resources and trying to survive the night. It is such a fun loop. This is a great break game to play or come back to in-between other major titles. [/quote] ──────────────────── [h2]Judgement - 8/12 ★[/h2]

игра очень медитативная и со своим вайбом заводской жизни. Много пушек,врагов и улучшалок, несколько платформ с уникальным гемплеем, шикарная русская озвучка и прогрессия. Но быстро к сожалению приедается и маловато контрактов, очень похожа чем-то на Doome Keeper этим, помаленьку играть нормально, но залпом не советую.

Unexpected great game!!