There’s nothing like an addictive rogue-lite to speed up the day, and that’s exactly what Drill Core is shaping up to be. The game combines several genres that are very easy to lose your time to and packages them all up into one as you both give orders to miners, build up a base, and structure out a tower defence element.
Your crew of miners starts drilling from the planet’s surface and gets to work, taking all the resources you can find. There are three different human classes, and you can upgrade Barack’s to get more if needed. Miners will hack away at blocks to find their way to resources; carriers pick them up and return them to your base platform, and gunners protect you from any aliens that spawn while you’re digging deeper into the ground. You select what blocks you’d like the miners to get stuck into. Otherwise, it’s all automated. But you’ll have to stay on your toes and redirect miners to remove dangerous obstacles that could hurt them or others if you’re to survive.
At the end of each day, bigger alien creatures will emerge from hiding, including a worm-like oke that will make you retreat your crew to the home base platform. But it’s at this point you’ll also need to look out from above as aliens start to descend upon you, looking to blow up your entire mining operation. Fortunately, you can place turrets into the walls to shoot them down before they reach you and create both automatic and triggered weapons for you to aim at the platform itself.
How you decide to divide your resources and where to invest early is part of Drill Cores’ strategy. Early waves of enemies at night are survivable with two basic turns, so I found upgrading my digging tools and crew to be more beneficial. But maybe not? Maybe it would be a better strategy to invest as much as I could in weapons to protect me at night and take a more patient approach to my mining, knowing that it’ll pay off in the long term.
In my time with the game, I’ve only had my crew wiped a couple of times, but most of the time, I’d chosen to end the mission and leave with whatever I had rather than die. A solid choice to make sure I can take some more experience and resources into upgrading some of the permanent upgrades, like using more abilities or even unlocking different types of upgrades for the Platform. But a frustrating one, knowing you’ll have to start from the top of the planet again each run, and these dig expeditions usually go for 30 minutes at least, which is why no option to save and return later is also a sour choice. You must be committed to seeing your run through to the finish.
A roadmap of content already lays out plans for the early access period, including new maps, another platform, upgrades and more. Currently, you kinda see everything the game has to offer in a few hours across two maps. However, there are still plenty of upgrades you can unlock by playing longer and working to unlock these by playing on higher difficulties and trying to hit certain objectives will keep you playing for 15-30 hours, at least based on my experience.
I’ve already lost hours in Drill Core trying to unlock everything, and there’s still content to come. That statement alone makes it easy to recommend this as a pick-up now rather than later.
(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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