Bury the lead in Drill Core.
I’ve played my fair share of rogue-likes in my time. Most of them are hack-and-slash games or are based on cards, but every now and then something with a little twist comes along that captures my interest a little more. Maybe it’s backpack management, or perhaps building a house. Sometimes it’s about mining, like in Drill Core.
Drill Core is a rogue-like mining game that’s similar in theme but different in execution to 2022’s surprisingly solid Dome Keeper. In the latter, you head down a mine shaft to acquire resources by day, then return to your dome by night to repel invaders. Drill Core has a similar concept but on a larger scale, focusing more on management than your own actions. I liked Dome Keeper well enough, but I feel that Drill Core builds on the concept really well.
Here, you manage an entire team of workers who head down into an ever more expansive mineshaft to gather resources that you’ll use to upgrade your mine platform. Once you’ve gained enough, your platform will take your team deeper to gather ever more shiny rocks until you reach a depth quota and can evacuate. When night falls you’ll be attacked, so you’d better have put those resources to work so you can protect your drill core for long enough to complete your task.
There’s a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek in Drill Core, with your workers happily sending themselves off into an almost certain death for the good of the company. It reminds me of Deep Rock Galactic in that regard, especially when playing as the explosive-loving dwarf team. Between runs you’ll get emails from the company and other parties who hugely respect your successes as well as disregard for the lives of the little guys who do all the work. Satire!
Surprisingly though, the plot isn’t the main thing in this rock-releasing rogue-like. Initially, things feel pretty overwhelming, as a lot of concepts are thrown at you very quickly without a lot of explanation. There’s a button labelled “Manual” on the main menu, but it takes you to a wiki page rather than any real tutorial. You’re introduced to Division Levels, Department Levels, Platform Levels, Qualifications, and Cores on the main menu alone. I was a little confused by all of it before I even started a run, and I was thrown further by the sheer amount of things thrown at you when you begin that first run. There are tooltips everywhere using all sorts of keywords that aren’t clear at all. I could see this putting off new players, but it’s worth persisting as once things click Drill Core is mostly very enjoyable.
It’s actually a lot simpler than it looks. You have three types of worker in the form of diggers, collectors, and guards. On any depth, you click on diggable rocks and your diggers will jetpack off to destroy them, then your collectors gather any usable minerals to take back to the platform, whilst guards will attack any threats that appear in the mine. Once you’ve gathered enough of a specific mineral, you can set the platform to dig down deeper to access a new shaft containing more mineral, and once at a pre-set depth, you can evacuate and complete the mission, taking any permanent resources with you to spend on upgrades for your next run. At its heart, it isn’t nearly as difficult as it’s made out to be.
Added complexity comes in the form of how you spend your resources in a stage. You can upgrade your platform with new buildings. These start simple, with structures to generate workers, resources, and worker upgrades, but before long you’ll randomly unlock other ones that give you various benefits. Some will heal workers, or destroy random blocks for you, whilst others give you active abilities that could gather a bunch of resources quickly or reveal where resources are hidden in the fog of war. You never have enough resources to build everything you need at any point, so you need to focus on what’s needed at the moment.
You’ll also need to use those resources to defend yourself. When night arrives, you’ll get monsters coming down the mineshaft to destroy your core, but you can build turrets on the side of the mine to attack them. Each level of the shaft for the first three levels gives you five slots for weapons, so you need to think about what to place as you’ll often have access to a lot of options. You start with a couple of simple straight up damage turrets, but you’ll quickly acquire a lot of choices. Machine guns, drone generators, poison turrets, and the almost essential weakening laser. Your turrets follow you as you move down the shaft, so you can plan ahead if you’re able to.
Early attacks will only have a few basic enemies, but it doesn’t take long for larger and more dangerous foes to appear. A lot of the time these are disappointingly just bigger, spongier foes, but you get the odd curve ball like ones that heal others when they die or fly down super fast before exploding. Knowing what appears at roughly each stage of the run makes your planning easier.
The thing is, the night sections are actually my least favourite part of Drill Core. You have a couple of active abilities you can acquire, but for the most part you’re just waiting to see if you’ll survive until morning where you can go back to mining. There’s a lot more management here, as your ever growing number of miners need to be directed where to mine carefully. Each of the three different planets has an array of blocks that are more dangerous. Some will fall if there’s nothing underneath, crushing workers. Others are explosive or spew out jets of flame or acid. Others still will generate enemies to chase down and kill your staff unless your guards can kill them. You need to ensure you’re getting enough resources to move your mission forward, but also intelligently targeting threat blocks so you don’t have to spend those resources on new workers.
I liked this element quite a lot, as your attention becomes ever more split around the mine due to you spreading further from the centre. You really need to keep the camera moving around to ensure no-one is going to get themselves killed. Your workers are not smart and will at most fly away from danger. They’ll happily chip away at a block that will explode when destroyed or sit under a block that will drop on their head, and with no way for you to directly control them, ensuring they always have somewhere to go and dig safely requires attention.
Upgrades between runs are fairly generic, with increased chances of getting more resources, starting with a bit more iron, and so forth. What’s more neat is the Qualification system that allows you to set a challenge for your next run, such as reach a certain depth or keep your core’s health above a certain level. Failure doesn’t incur any penalty, but success unlocks buildings for future runs, so you frequently have new toys to play with which I appreciate a lot more. You also have an upgrade track that levels up as you play. You can pick each track to work up to unlock buildings on it that you’re interested in. There’s always something fresh for each run, so even though they can take a while, you feel like you’ll get another new option at the end which does a lot to push that “one more run” mindset.
You even have three different species to use, each of which plays wildly different. Humans are simple enough to understand, but the dwarves require a lot more though, using your population up faster but deploying explosives for digging that damages all blocks around them. Being honest these were my least favourite to play as due to feeling like I had less direct control. I did like the alien Swaminid though, they use huge numbers of drones that are weaker, but can focus things down quickly once you get the population going.
Drill Core‘s presentation is great which helps, with things being really quite clear once you know what to look for. Enemy blocks stand out, as do explosives and all those resources you want. There’s even action pausing that allows you to freeze gameplay and issue orders as well as highlight what each block or enemy is. It’s well thought out in this regard. Voice work and sound effects are great too, meaning you’ll often be able to figure out what’s happened off camera if you pay attention. Music is a little tame really, although the main menu music is a bit of an ear worm, simple though it may be.
I really quite enjoyed Drill Core. Once you’re over the initial storm of information, there’s a really fun resource management game here that has a lot of content. Three planets, with six difficulties, each of which has its own set of modifiers gives you lots of ways to play, as do the sheer volume of different buildings to deploy. Add the three different species to play as and you’ve got loads to play with. I will say that the difficulty isn’t all that intense, even at the higher end, but it’s challenging enough once you reach that level to force your attention somewhat. I’d recommend you take a look at this if you’re a bit jaded on all the identikit rogue-likes out there.
Drill Core is available now on PC.
Comments are closed.