Drill Down Reviews

Recommended if you like light weight factorio games. The 3D 'drill down' mechanism is a very nice addition. The game is kind of slow, it will can take several hours before a steam engine is researched. But If nice controls and a polished product are necessary for you to enjoy a game, don't buy it (read below why). One thing that is bothering me and I suspect will leave me the game before the end game are the controls and the placement of items. There are hardly any shortcuts, so you have to select buildings or belts from a two layered menu that needs to be opened each time. The placement of belts is often of, so you need to re-rotate them and crossing a belt with another belt will not create a bridge. So you will be "pressing B -> click Transport -> click belt" a lot. The developer could invest in a quick short key solution, just by 1,1 is belt, 2,1 is funnel etc. (corresponding to the places in the menu) but has chosen to only support bug fixes since 2019.

This is one of those great value indie dev finds that you don't find too often. Drill Down is one of those games I want more of. Recent end game content has improved it since my earlier playthroughs and as such it's a great game to come back to and revisit. Active discord and developer's reportedly working on a sequel. Definitive BUY recommendation, and at this price, I'd say buy it twice (just to encourage the dev on a job well done).

This is a brain burner! If you like automation/factory building style games, this one is right up there with Factorio, Mindustry, Automation Empire and the like. This one doesn't do the tower defense aspect of the first two mentioned, and you don't have to worry about money like in later. Your currency in this game, is space. Not just how much space you have on the map, but also in your inventory. If you don't manage your resources well, you will lose right out of the gate. The game is very unforgiving to those that don't plan or pay attention to what is happening. The graphics could be a negative strike for some, but I enjoy the minimalist style of this one. One programmer but a lot of thought into this one. The price tag is well worth it, and I am enjoying the hell out of it. Mind you, it was a bit frustrating to start, but after I got a better feel for the mechanics, man did this one end up shining up nicely. 8/10 will recommend if you like those factory building style games. :)

I love the game play of Drill Down, but the Steam version does not size correctly on a 3840 x 2160 display screen, sadly the game is completely unplayable on the best modern screen display size. It does work fine if the display is set down to 1620 x 1080 but that is not an acceptable solution. ***UPDATE*** - I have done some further investigation..... The problem seems to be in the Java Run Time Environment that Drill Down uses to run. I have used Java elsewhere and so have a JRE installed already - it is this that causes the problem. I was able to uninstall this and ------------- the JRE distributed along with Drill Down kicks in and --------- it works *************** GREAT GAME - also available on mobile phone (but save files are not easily moved between these different versions - although it can be done manually)

Great game! Very addictive (spent 34 hours on Android playing the game). Choose your own goals. Just synchronized the save from Android via an external app and GDrive with desktop version and it works great.

I love factory/automation type games, but the UI for this is painful. Shame as it does look interesting.

*edit 2025* The game is no longer available to buy on Steam or the Android version on the Google Play store. I have backups of the installs fortunately - it is Java and it runs on my linux laptop and android 14 phone even though it has not been updated for that android version. I still play it. While I do still play Factorio and try new games of the genre like Foundry or Megafactory Titan, etc, I come back to this game a lot - its a classic that will hopefully be available to buy again one day. *edit 2024* Still one of the best games in the genre. A hidden gem. Also to add. Other reviews say there are no blueprints. There are, you just have to research them first. Also personally I find the UI to be just fine - it's nothing fancy it is just a great UI that you don't even notice once you get into the game. Still enjoy playing it. Original Review 2019 Great chilled logistics, management, just get on with it and learn it's ways. It rewards the time put into it. It has it's own style which I really like. There is only one game speed and no pressure, just continually tweak and optimise. The game-world is potentially huge, although part of the fun is getting all the stuff done in as small a space as possible. There are comparisons to mindustry and factorio but it is it's own game. I prefer it to those in many ways. The dev is also clearly committed to the game and is responsive to reports. I would recommend this game to anyone. Edit to add - Having played a lot of Satisfactory lately, I would now say that Satisfactory has a lot more in common with Drill Down than Factorio. Both Satisfactory and Drill Down have a 3d element to the building, also they both lack the tower defence aspect that Factorio and Mindustry have. Mainly though the kind of logistics problems and solutions are far more similar in Satisfactory and Drill Down. In Factorio you have logistics robots and picking/placing robots, in Mindustry you have teleporters. I find these things detract from the problem solving. I much prefer the emphasis on conveyor belt splitters and mergers that Satisfactory and Drill down go with, The more I play Drill Down and other similar games the more I appreciate how good Drill Down is. *edit 2023* Still playing and enjoying this game, mostly on my phone. The saves are compatible. Easily compares to the best games of this genre, and doesn't get stale.

This game *could* have been brilliant for those of us who love factory/conveyor type games. It gets so many things right - a big tech tree, a nice hook (moving product between fixed size mining floors), runs smoothly, graphics are basic but functional. The challenge is there for designing, building, balancing and optimising layouts for your factory. Plus a great price in terms of hours of play you "could" get out of it. But it has one major unforgivable flaw that you see mentioned in almost every review - the worst PC controls of any game I have ever played. The developer *could* have fixed this so easily - a few hours of tweaks would have made it tolerable, and a couple of days of effort could have made it fun to play. Instead he gave up on the game in 2019 vowing no more development other than bug fixes, leaving it with the same dreadful user interface made for touch screens. The first 10-20 hours you push on despite the controls, fighting them constantly but wanting to enjoy the rest of the factory gameplay elements that drew you in. But as you learn more about how to optimize and layout things better and find yourself restarting a few times eventually the appetite for rebuilding, early game grind and just how many mouse clicks that will involve wears you down. Now 60 hours in I really wanted to push on and finish this game - but when you realise a bunch of buildings need to be moved one or two tiles over and that will take thousands of mouse clicks and countless hours eventually you have to ask yourself why am I bothering? I'm clearly not alone - go try to find a Let's Play series on YT for instance and you will find only two series - one played on an Android phone, the other on PC but the gamer gave up early in their first playthrough. Such a wasted opportunity - I'm a s/w developer myself (not of games) and it frustrates me to hell to think of the thousands of hours of effort that went into designing, developing and balancing this game that has so many excellent aspects to it and could have been at least a cult classic in this genre. Just that final few % of effort into some QoL and UI features would at least have made this game a massive positive recommendation. Why would you choose to leave it in this state when even a few minor tweaks would make such a difference? If the developer ever does read this and wonders wtf I am complaining about - here is a few hints: - I've seen the developer try to defend the choice of so many mouse clicks to actually choose a building/conveyor, claiming he wanted to present the recipe information on the intermediate screen. There are two alternatives - put an Info button on that menu for the low % of time the player needs that, or use a tooltip. - On PC we have (at least) two mouse buttons. Let us escape out of the current activity with a right click - don't make it build stuff! - On PC we have a shift key, so you don't have to press R three times to rotate left once. - Those "pins" for confirming belts are clunky and awful - at times requiring more mouse movement just to confirm. - Give us hotkeys to go up/down floors - Go play Factorio and look at what the Q key does as an eyedropper - total game changer also implemented by any other building game worth playing. - Of course we would ideally want a customizable build toolbar that we can build off using hotkeys. - Cut/copy/paste for parts of the factory - making it feasible to move or replicate without a million extra mouse clicks and hours of wasted time. The fun part in these games is moving through the tech tree, designing layouts and balancing. Let players focus on the "fun" and less on having them repeat thousands of actions like a robot.

Really nice game, BUT.... I play few hours on Android version. Control are little bit painfull but on tablet it's normal. Why, did you keep this terrible method to place building on pc version? You charge more for pc version but dont really adapt it. I keep an eye on this game and pray for update. With so many available games on pc, I dont want to deal with this... Guys, play any rts/building game and take notes. You have a really good game, many resources, management is fun, different layer is a great idea, graphic are ok and I can live with that. But control are painfull for a pc game.

This game seems to have gotten lost in the firehose of Steam releases which is a pity. This is exactly the kind of game you hope for when looking through the raw list of releases, a gem that you wouldn't otherwise find by just reading review sites or looking through big name Let's Plays. The good: It presents a great logistical optimization puzzle. You are given a blank canvas and progressively unlock more complicated crafting chains and tools for managing them over time. It is different enough from Factorio or Satisfactory or Minecraft mods to provide a fresh puzzle. Not only is there a different crafting tree, but the methods you use to manage things are a bit different. Each building is a different size with different locations for inputs and outputs. And some resources are fixed in place while others can be harvested anywhere. So each crafting chain ends up being a slightly different kind of puzzle to make a compact solution. And like any good game of this type, the trickiness of the puzzle stems mostly from decisions you yourself have made in the past. I am often thinking "I could do this if there was more space in that direction, but I built this other chain too close and so I have to go that way". After the very early game, you get into a research system for progression with varied inputs. Researching a tech means needing just so many of an item. So that means that you need to restructure your crafting chains over time to get to different required materials. It isn't just a matter of spamming higher and higher tiers or 'research potions'. I really like this variety. While the graphics are basic, everything is very clear. You never get confused about what does what. The bad: Aside from the basic graphics, the UI can be pretty clunky. There is no cancel hotkey that I could find. So that means once you start building, you have to click the 'X', though tapping the build hotkey twice ('B') will effectively cancel. There are a lot of times where you need to click twice to actually do something (once to select, a second to confirm) and that can be hard to get used to. There is not a lot of tension. There are no gameplay reasons to worry (no external pressure like aliens), and there is no narrative structure to pull you along (just amorphous unlocking of techs). Overall, this is a great value for the price. If you put it head-to-head against the other games of this little genre (like Factorio and Satisfactory) then it doesn't have the graphical punch or the polish that those games bring. On the other hand, this was developed by one person and the core mechanics are solid, providing hours of good logistical planning fun. And I'm happy to have made the purchase to see a different twist on this kind of game. For the price of a cup of coffee, you get the content of a new Minecraft modpack but with a truly coherent progression and crafting chains designed a single author and no need to punch yet more trees.