G.E.O is a Indie, Adventure, Mining game.
Explore the solar systems as you drill through Comets, Moons, Planets, and Gas Giants to reach their precious cores, while growing your Headquarters and becoming #1 in the Divisions!
The game offers a ton of Unique solar systems, home to a wide variety of planets, each with there own elemental hazards, pressures, and monsters. While also sharing a variety of rocks, stones, and materials for you to discover as you drill to the center.
As you progress through each solar system, you will eventually run into some trouble. Every time a planet's core is drilled, it becomes a husk, giving you no further progress to achieve. To remedy this, there are important upgrades that can boost the planets level, each planet upgrade makes the planets drilling operations much harder with an influx on elemental and pressure damage. Making planning and strategizing more important when tackling the bigger planets and gas giants. Also, in order to visit these higher level planets you will need to search for them again as you explore the solar systems.
While exploring the solar systems, you may come across missing shop items; these can be found and bought later at the shops when you are no exploring. Following this there are also a few unique crew members that are scattered around the solar systems, each one with their own set of benefits that can be helpful to your drilling capabilities. However, in order to hire them you will need to give them a few items first before you can go and hire them onto your crew, and finally there are the item crates; these will give you a few randomly selected items when interacted with and can be useful when you are being introduced to new items you haven't discovered yet.
The monsters; at first the game doesn't tell you anything about them, especially in the tutorial so just a heads up on that. But, once you get to see all of them though, their pretty much the only ones you will be seeing for the entire time you play this game. Each one is unique on how it goes about trying to destroy your drill; some will destroy stones or taint them making them no longer valuable, while others will just chase you for an eternity and try to make your drilling life miserable (Emphasis to a small enemy that looks like Oscar the Grouch).
Along with drilling to the center of the planet, you will occasionally run into power up crates. Each crate can give you a certain boost to your drill, examples of this are; healing lost drill health, a resistance to elemental pressures, a boost to light sources, special explosives to clear large areas, and additional buffs to money, crew member experience points, and research points earned. Also on very rare instances, you may also find one of two special items. One being a chest of varying colors that can give you a lot of money, research points, or items and the other being a large Power- up that can double the boost of previously mentioned boosts or can make traversal of the trip much safer by doubling pressure to take less damage, or remove enemies off the board for a single mining run.
Another thing to bring up is; Upgrades! As you begin to accumulate cores from the planets you drilled through, you will be able to spend them for upgrades towards your drill and HQ. These upgrades provide various benefits to one's drill health, defense, and strength to make reaching the deepest parts of the hardest planets easier. While upgrades to HQ; increase room capacity to bring on more crew members that can provide even more benefits to your drill, increases to money earned over the course of time while playing, and cuts to exploration costs while searching for new planets.
On the same topic, lets discuss; Research! Similar to Upgrades, these give you a slight boost to your HQ and Drill when certain milestones are met. They are split into two categories, Research Cells and Research Medals. With Cells you will need to collect a wide variety and quantity of items in order to complete Research Cells. Upon completion of these cells and reaching a milestone you will gain a unique room that can be used for your HQ. Now for Research medals, while exploring and drilling for a while, the amount of materials and items found will count towards there own progression meters, once an item or stone has been collected enough it can be cashed in for a medal. Earning enough Research medals will grant you; a Drill that has it own special perk. Collecting more medals will earn you stronger drills with varying perks as well.
Not making enough money from the stones you drilled? Well with enough research coins you can spend them on the Roulette wheel. Each time you roll the wheel, a randomly selected stone will gain a permanent increase in value, making it so whenever you drill that specific stone again in the future you will gain extra money from it.
Lastly, I'd like to mention this game does become a bit of a grind when it comes to gathering materials, especially when finishing any remaining medals or research cells. At the beginning its not so bad, since most of the collecting and completions are done while playing normally, but afterwards towards the the final Division you will be spending a lot of time on certain planets looking for very specific items to finish certain tasks. So do be wary of that if you're not a fan of collecting stuff.
To some this game might not be for everyone on the account of the grinding aspect, but for what it's worth I still think it's a fun game to play. It's pretty easy to learn and play, and difficult enough when it comes to full completion. So I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to give this game a try.
