Drill Core is a roguelite colony simulator created by Hungry Couch Games where you harvest resources from planets. You must build the infrastructure that lets you hire staff and protect your base from aliens. Mining is a dangerous activity and you will lose staff to accidents or unexpected enemies. Do your best to travel down to a planet’s core as much as possible while achieving unique objectives along the way.
Having random turrets and resource layouts gives you a fresh experience with every run as you learn how to play. There’s a good challenge with each run and the price of failure is low, encouraging you to retry. Gameplay does get repetitive quickly since it’s mostly mining and tower defense with random elements. Drill Core does a great job in giving you a challenge and objectives to work towards with a game that’s easy to play.
The premise of the game is that you are a manager of a drilling operation that harvests resources from planets. Your goal is to meet certain quotas and objectives that involve mining various resources from a planet. Depending on your level, your objectives might be going down a certain depth or constructing a certain number of buildings. However, alien life on these planets aren’t welcoming and you must fight them off.
The roguelite elements come from the randomness of the upgrades and the mining layout. You never know how many resources you will find as only a few are guaranteed. The turrets you obtain determine your strategy in fending off the aliens. You mine in the morning and fend off the aliens at night, repeating this until you leave or get overwhelmed. Managing your time and knowing how far you can push your operations is a fun balance to work with.
Drill Core immerses you in the mission by putting the fate of the miners and the operation in your hands. The operation is easy at first but the danger ramps up the further you go into the planet’s depths. Your choices determine whether you get more ore or lose half your crew to a silly mistake. While you can’t predict what mining hazards you get in advance, every danger is avoidable. It’s up to you to decide whether the risk is worth the reward.
To boost the immersion, you have certain objectives to complete if you want to progress your career. These goals differ depending on the buildings you want to unlock and the difficulty you are on. Choosing your own objectives immerses you in the manager role even further; you choose what you think is important to the company. Once you make your choices, you decide how your staff operate or if they must be sacrificed for the greater good.
However, the immersion quickly gives way to boredom as you continue repeating the same activities every run. While it may resemble managerial work, it reduces the incentive to pursue new objectives. Unlocking more content means more mining operations and the content may not necessarily make things easier. The lack of incentive to continue clashes with the immersion, making it hard to continue when the charm wears off.
The goal of each mining run is to harvest as many materials as you can. You mine resources at every level but you always need six coal harvests to mine further into a planet’s depths. What you harvest goes into purchasing buildings, hiring staff, or paying for upgrades. Every building contributes to your operations in some way and it’s up to you to figure out what you prefer. Figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t is part of the fun.
Like every roguelite, your starting operations will have several mistakes. You may mine from blocks that are dangerous and lose several workers. But the cost of failure is low and experimentation is highly encouraged. Taking risks now and losing workers might force an early retreat but gives you knowledge for the future. The idea that future mining runs can be more successful gives you the motivation to continue.
You can also unlock different races and work with different planet types for a new challenge. For example, regular mining crews work with precision and cost less to hire. Working with dwarves lets you use several explosives but one dwarf takes up the space of two regular workers. Experimenting and figuring out what works adds to the fun, opening up more possibilities to help you succeed.
Unfortunately, none of this changes gameplay enough to add variation to keep things fresh. Even if you are using dwarves to mine on an icy planet, it’s fundamentally the same operation. Unless you are challenging yourself to see how far you go, the variations quickly lose their charm. As fun as it is in the beginning, even variations can’t effectively stave off boredom once you realize the path to success.
Drill Core is a fun roguelite that lets you control your mining operations and experiment with new upgrades. It’s fun to try new builds or any new upgrades that you unlock. Mining itself can be unpredictable and that adds to the excitement. The game doesn’t do well over the long-term though as the activities get repetitive even with new variations and challenges. For a colony simulator that makes you think on your feet, Drill Core offers some good excitement for a while.
Victor reviewed Drill Core with a code provided by the publisher.
