Full Bore

amazing puzzles, amazing ost, cute pixel graphic, 10/10

Tusks charge ahead fast Every tunnel hides new paths Victory digs deep

This game was from 2014? It seems like it's managed to avoid much attention. That's a pity. At its best, Full Bore is the mining-themed puzzle game that Steamworld Dig toyed around with being but never became. It's frequently satisfying with nice "Aha" moments, and sometimes disappointing with "oh wait, was that it?" moments. Occasional puzzles demand precise timing, and alas those puzzles are the game at its worst; Full Bore has a good control scheme for a square-grid block-pushing puzzle game and a lousy control scheme for a precision platformer. Other sections of the game are a race against the clock and these are also somewhat annoying for the same reason. These bits would put the belief in my mind that I haven't got the correct solution to a puzzle when I do but can't consistently execute it, or conversely that my approach is wrong because there isn't enough time to pull it off even though it is the intended answer. Maybe the devs considered implementing a turn-based mode and couldn't make it work. Maybe I'm old and have the reaction times of a senile tortoise (okay, fair play, there's no "maybe" for that one). In either case I wish the timings were ever so slightly more relaxed. The game has a rewind ability that helps mitigate the frustrating elements, excepting that it's prone to jank - it's serviceable most of the time but if you miss the window in one of those timing puzzles (which you will, a lot) one step backwards almost never takes you to a helpful moment so you have to rewind further and redo other steps of the puzzle. During one puzzle in particular the rewind would constantly give up and only offer to send me back to the beginning of the puzzle. It has the occasional bug - an error message when I first ran it that didn't reappear thereafter, and one time the game hanged so potently during a level transition that I couldn't even open task manager to kill the process. I also managed to lose a small amount of progress a couple of times by exiting the game wrong - Full Bore doesn't appear to have manual saves but also doesn't autosave at mid-level checkpoints as you might expect it to (a couple of the levels are quite large, so be sure not to leave the game halfway through one). The script could have used a proof-reading, some of the spellings are wrong and some words were dropped. From this (and the jank) I assumed the game was from a non-English speaking country but apparently the devs were from the USA. Congratulations on making a game that feels like it could have been made in Eastern Europe. I'm not being sarcastic. I've been very negative but on the whole hog (oh hang on, the devs already though of that joke), I really like Steamworld Pig. I'm being like this because it has a lot of heart, but it demands a willingness from the player to accept its faults.

One of the most underrated games on Steam (based on number of reviews, not what they say). Very enjoyable puzzle platformer, with just enough story to keep you interested while not getting in the way of the game play.

this game rules bigtime, fun puzzles, fun storytelling, i love it very much

This game....is actually really good. It's a 2014 indie game with less than 200 reviews on Steam, so I wasn't exactly going into it with high hopes, especially I got it from some bundle I got nearly a decade ago and forgot about. But everything works really well! Full Bore is an open-world 2D puzzle game with mechanics that revolve around digging through different kinds of blocks. The gameplay can definitely get a little repetitive, but the puzzles are challenging without being frustrating, the writing is cute, the story is surprisingly engaging, and the OST is a huge banger. The biggest problem is how easy it is to get lost in the huge world, as well as the foreseeable burnout of the similar puzzle structure. That being said, this is absolutely a hidden gem game.

3/10

Nicely made puzzle. It can look not so neat, but this factor must not stop puzzle-lovers.