Drill Core Reviews

the game is very fun, also ive only played this on Steam Deck so far and i have to disagree with the guy saying the control scheme is bad on the Deck, its pretty smooth and in no way does it hinder you in game

Drilling, plus strategy plus upgrades = great! Didn't expect much from this, but it's actually a very very good game. Good concept with a little DRG feel mixed with dome keeper. Highly recommended!

I mainly played this on my SteamDeck and after 1.0 they filled out all the smaller QOL things I knew and didn't knew I wanted! It is a fun gameplay loop and plays very smooth on the deck. I find it having plenty content for someone who plays here and there in the evening and I have yet to try all the content so a buy for less then 20 USD I find this is a well polished game and I can find this as a delightful game to enjoy on the SteamDeck when I just want to take it easy and relax. Thanks for making good and solid game in times of microtransaction and AAA slop :)

Falls into a reeaally boring and repetitive grind of nothing new after 3 hours. Pretty much every building has no real impact, which is a shame, since there is so many buildings. But again, grinding for buildings that have no real impact is pretty god damn boring.

Good game, but I think it could be better with certain additions and other improvements in the future. More worlds, more divisions and platform improvements motivated the player to want to play more.

Excellent digging game. Anyone giving this a bad rating does not appreciate quality digging.

It looks really good, it's very well made. But I just am not having much fun with it even though I try. It seems to be just constantly stressfull and your economy is always on the edge; you never get satisfying downtime or so. Every level feels the same, no significant changes in your approach. There are way too many options and upgrades to choose from, it's all just too much for me. I can also barely feel the impact of my choices.

I got 8 hours out of this game in total. 4 hours relatively enjoyable but in the end this was very repetitive and just not that interesting.

Played two evenings of this and already feel very burned out on it. Falls into the category of game that's a spinning-plates Slot machine with a tech tree of further slot machines. The whole experience just sort of blurs together with a barrage of micro decisions with opaque results that all feel rather samey. It's all very competently put together, but just... isn't fun in the end? Idk. It's difficult to pin down what's missing centrally. It all feels so smoothly incremental that it lacks significant punctuated moments of progress or meaning.

It's another one of those spins on Dome Keeper, which I always like. On this one you are not directly controlling the miners, but "hiring" them and selecting which tiles they should mine (among a few other things). It's nice, but presentation-wise it's a bit all over the place. It's not uncommon for me to check an indie game and see that its devs took a bunch of stuff they liked from other games and smashed them together to create it. While it ends up looking nice enough, it becomes really difficult for it to stand on its own legs. Gameplay has quite a few problems, such as: - Questionable AI: your guys just stand there sometimes. - Meaningless decisions: Tons of different upgrades to choose from in any given run that don't feel impactful at all (weapons that appear to do the same thing, buildings that you'll never have the time or space to build), a bunch of different kinds of permanent resources to exchange for permanent upgrades that feel convoluted (It's even a bit hard to explain. You have your division level, your department level, your platform level, general upgrades, platform upgrades and three colorful differently shaped currencies. Maybe you get even more later on, who knows. Maybe you get a cat and that has its own level too). - Somewhat poor visual clarity: For example, there is a sand block that can easily kill multiple of your units if there are no blocks to hold it up, It's very important that this doesn't happen.However, the sand block, when compared to a regular block, is simply slightly browner. It's often not very clear what is a sand block and what isn't. Something that becomes even harder to see when you select the blocks you want mined (the block gets a shade of yellow). There are other examples of this throughout the game so far. - Action queue limits: The runs feel long enough as they are, however they become even longer by the game simply not allowing you to queue more than a handful of mining actions at any given time. So, by upgrading your miners and getting more of them, you have to constantly be clicking the tiles, even pausing to do that if you want to be efficient and not fall to hard to spot traps. So, it ends up becoming boring fast. This could do with a few updates.