Drill Core

It's really unfortunate that I cannot say the game as a whole clicks together, because the moment-to-moment gameplay is actually very fun. Clearing out mines, micromanaging to work around the special block threats, making decisions on which technologies to get and which defences to set up, it all works very well. The problem is that on a structural level, there is no pressure to do all that well in any of those aspects, or to pivot your strategy in a different direction, or to care, really. The game lacks meaningful ways to challenge you. There are some things to keep in mind, have an answer for the swarms of small enemies, day 2-3 have an answer for bigger single targets, after that consider adding debuffs or slows because they make everything more efficient, but all of these are things you pick up in the first few runs. And even if you don't have a great answer in one of those categories, you can just throw more resources at it and it'll work out fine. You get a pretty generous healthbar which means you are never reasonably dying from just one day of mismanagement, so I presume the way you are intended to be challenged is through constant pressure which slowly chips away at that healthbar. But as said, it's only a matter of investing resources to stop that from happening, or reverse it with one of the 7 ways to restore health, so I presume the challenge then is meant to be balancing those resources - if you invest too much into defending then you not investing in researches and workers to gather those resources faster in the future, so eventually you will fall behind. In theory. In practice, you get so far ahead of the difficulty curve on the first day that you would have to actively try to not snowball. I could go into detail on exactly how you can maximise that lead, using meta-upgrades like the one letting the platform pick up resources during a dig to alleviate the need for carriers letting you focus on just digging, but that really is not the root of it. The only thing you actually need to do is realise that double the workers means double the things done, and just keep building barracks. Once you make the easy realisation that in a system where resources lead to more resources, investing into getting more resources is good, you are clear for the rest of the run. I made it to difficulty 17 in my playtime, which isn't the maximum, but each difficulty is only incrementally harder so I do not expect 18 or 20 to suddenly be perfectly balanced, and if they were having to go through 40 hours of game to unlock them would be its own issue. In that time I lost two missions, one in the first hour, where I learned that having single target turrets is a good idea, and one when I first tried the resource delivery mission type and deconstructed all of my turrets to get there because I did not know that the delivery took 3 days. There were also some quick restarts from realising the turret i had brought could not cover the mine on day 1 due to mission range modifiers, if you want to count that. But I never had that experience of slowly being chipped down. There is always some way to use resources to prevent that, and I was always ahead enough on resources to be able to use them. I don't think this is because of any particular skill on my part, there are a lot of things you could be doing better, better micromanagement of the miners, staying in the mine at night and manually dodging the worms, selling turrets more to accelerate in the morning and end up with more iron overall... but again, there is no reason to. There is no pressure to develop these skills, because you will never come close to losing from not having them. It does try to throw some curveballs, there are bosses which can randomly spawn and theoretically interrupt your snowballing. In practice though you can just deconstruct any defences you set up to counter them, so the actual pattern ends up being saving up your resources for one day and then paying 2-3 iron to continue snowballing. Or you don't even have to do that, at the point they show up you are already way ahead of the curve to the point that you can take that hit and stay ahead. The game also has other issues as a result, one being the lack of variability between runs. You get different towers and upgrades, yes, but their differences do not end up meaningfully mattering. Again, you need group, singletarget, and then ideally some kind of debuff, but which tower you get to do that, whether you get watchtowers or abilities, the differences and potential synergies or antisynergies between them do not matter in the timeframe it takes to finish the objective. You can always go beyond that, but then you run into a different issue in that you end up unlocking any technology you could want late into a run, so you can always pick out the best, and notably the same, options. It also doesn't help that after defeating the boss, the difficulty curve again stays way below the curve of your resource gathering, so it becomes a sandbox for you to do whatever qualification goal you selected. There is still a lot of fun to be had, while you are still figuring things out and each decision feels important because you don't know which ones actually are, it works very well. But it just fails to be a compelling roguelike and if you asked me to recommend something, it wouldn't be one of the games I'd go to.

I played the demo one of the Steam demo events last year and I enjoyed it. It sat on my wishlist as one of my most wanted indies and recently a friend hooked me up with it. This was a great surprise. I highly recommend it.

This game just doesn't click for me, it doesn't feel like it has any towerdefense gameplay at all. Its all about managing the mine and maybe 5% going back and building towers. I like to play games in a challenging way, think about how to to play optimaly and get the most out of my situation. You can't do that here without boring yourself to death, the game speed is an issue but the speed up toggle and "fast mode" fix that. The issue instead is that you need to micromanage the mine all-the-time, if you have sped up the time and an enemy spawner "pops up" as they do, when you see it and pause to try and prevent it chances are that you are too late. Because you weren't playing on snail mode. Realistically your options are a) Play slow turtle mode and bore yourself out of your mind while micro managing things and pausing to stop yourself from losing resources. b) Play on fast mode and lose things constantly because you are too slow to react. The micromanagement is not even fun or rewarding, its literaly "a bad thing is going to spawn, I need to tell my guys to destroy it, "a rock is about to spew fire, I need to tell my guys to move", "My drill instructions just go cancelled because it was bedrock behind a rock and now my driller is idle not doing anything, need to right click more stuff". Its not interesting decisionmaking, it just feels like work, I'm not here to work, I'm here to have fun. I guess the players that enjoy this game don't sweat as much about optimising as I do.

The developer doesn't respond or fix bugs. Don't buy.

The games is a mixture of tower defense and base management. It has a similar vibe as "Ark of Charon". During the day you gather resources via mining and during the night you defend against growing enemy waves. I would give it somewhat a neutral review. The game has a lot of good things - especially considering the price tag - but it also suffers from, what I view, fundamental design flaws. I reached the maximum difficulty and also completed some of the 1% achievements, so I'd say I experienced most of the core game at least. Positives: - The game is fairly easy to understand and play. I didn't have to look for any tutorials or "let's play" to get going. - It has a lot of diversity. You have multiple platforms, cores, specialists, building types, tower types, technologies, distorsions, biomes, mission types ..etc. There is a lot of customisation in both pre-mission and adjustments during mission. - The main loop / core mechanic fits quite well. It can be a bit addictive - which is a mark of a good game - I personally like the aesthetics. Not complex but enough to feel that you are playing a modern game. - I didn't encounter any bugs in 50h of play. Neutral: - I like the idea of progression and upgrades but I dislike the idea of game-changing upgrades. Giving a class of towers 10% more damage is fine. Giving the platform the "Suction ores" ability completly changes your playstyle and you tripple your income from day 1. This makes the upgrade pretty much mandatory but it's pretty far in the tech tree. Negatives: - Probably my biggest complaint would be the extreme micromanagement of workers at night. Generally speaking, you mine during the day and at night you fight. But that's not entirely accurate. Because if you micromanage your workers you can get resources during the night as well. You "just" have to dodge the worms. Which is a very micro-intensive thing to do especially with high worker count. But you lose about 25% income if you don't. This gameplay sucks. You pause every second and reroute X workers. If you mess up you lose the run. High APM should not be a requirement in a colony/tower defense type of game. This is a design flaw. - Workers are just to fragile. When you mine you can unlock a plethora of things that can 1 shot your basic workers even with max upgrades. You just dug up a flamerock? You lost 3 workers. You dug up a boulder? You lost 4 workers. You didn't deny the enemy spawn? Your worker dies before the guards show up to defend. This puts you in a position where you have to dig tile by tile or risk heavy deaths. When you have 30 workers and you have to assign every tile for evey worker it becomes unfun. If you lose 4 workers, your entire income for that day is lost. Especially at high worker count, the cost is pretty significant (one worker is more expensive than the most expensive turret in the game). You spend 95% of the game paused and selecting tiles and 5% running. This is not a good gaming experience. - There are some imabalanced in the game. For example, foundry - which is one of the first buildings - gives you income every turn. The problem is that only the first foundry is worth the cost. All others are a waste of resources as they won't become profitable. This is not complex math. I've seen posts with complains about this in 2024. Yet in 2026 and nothing was done about it. Adjusting some numbers on a basic building is not complicated which makes me believe that there is nobody doing anything about the game balance. Same can be said about other things - like some towers being superior in all scenarios and some being absolute trash. - Your main way of aquiring permanent resources (used in permanent upgrades) is via contracts. The problem is that most contract are to easy and to unrewarding. Even at highest difficulty, I can finish the contracts without buying a single tower (outside of the 2 free ones offered at start). The requirement of completing the mission is to low. So is the reward. So if you want upgrades you end up spamming easy missions basically. The difficult part if at high depths but you never get to that point. There should be contracts that ask the player to go to 1000m (for example) but offer a hefty reward. This would be more engaging gameplay. TLDR Rating: 65 / 100 This could be a 9/10 game with some adjustments but I don't know if anyone works toward that goal.

hi. this is my second review of the first 5 minutes of gameplay of a game in the last ten minutes. i just softlocked the game. within 5 minutes. sooooooooo...... im gonna give it a downvote. a clue for future gamers. dont build 2 turrets on one side. you.... just... sit there while you lose 1000 hitpoints 1 per second apparently and theres nothing you can do about it. to avoid doing what i do. first, notice that you may only build 2 turrets and foresee that left to right distance means something for the first time ever. dont be like me.

This is a fun game that sucked me in, took several days of my time, and even though I didn't play everything available in it, it left me satisfied. Drill Core is simple ... get a random mission, drill to get resources that you'll either keep for meta progression, make it easier to do the mission, or to actually do the mission (like coal to go down a certain distance or resources you need to send back home early). And it is satisfying in that it has a fun game loop ... drill during the day, fight monsters coming down the shaft at night ... repeat. I wish that there was more variety in the dialogue ... hearing the same phases repeated ad nauseum gets irritating. But the graphics are servicable for the job, the biomes are distinct and have interesting challenges (do you let the monsters spawn in the mine during the day to get extra resources while risking your miners, do you go hard for their nests, or do you try to avoid them entirely?) I wish there was more to the game, some kind of actual story that we were playing through, where the meta progression played into advancing the story, but it's just random missions on different planets, which can be satisfying enough.

Honestly, it's not perfect, and the pure amount of buildings and turrets really often leads to some runs where you either get crushed fast, or you become extremely powerful. But gosh, there is something addicting about this game. Digging cleverly underground Boulder Dash-style, trying to avoid falling rocks and trying to extract as much resources, while playing a normal but fairly unique Turret Defense game on the surface is kind of good. The mixture of genres is real good. It's like part RTS, part Turret Defense, part worker manager kind of thing. Trying to unlock more building types and mixing them together in overpowered combos (or finding/drafting buildings to solve your current problem in the map before you lose) is really fun. There is some joy watching those little bastards mine and gather resources, and you trying your best not to murder them by accident. The unique mission types are meh, I could take it or leave it. But the raw amount of buildings and turrets is really cool. Then you find perks underground, and they've added "disortions" you can find underground if you really wanna make your run wacky (like, double resources but twice-as-tough rocks, for example). It's really awesome. Sometimes I forget about this game, but whenever I return, I end up playing until 5 AM. It's great. I'm playing real slow, approaching difficulty 8 now (out of 10 I think?), but I enjoy doing "contracts" and just unlocking more and more buildings and turrets.

[h2]Gameplay ★★★☆ – Good[/h2] [list] [*] a very unique twist of tower defense, resource management, and harvesting [/list] [h2]Performance ★★★☆ – Good [/h2] [list] [*]No issues. Loading screens are fine. Should be toaster capable [/list] [h2]Value ★★☆☆ 2 – Ok [/h2] [list] [*] My $1=1hr rule is a close one here. While I can see myself playing 20 hrs. I doubt I ever will. [/list] ──────────────────── [h2]Review[/h2] [quote] I enjoyed every moment I played this game outside of using the dwarves. Nothing against the dwarves but they are NOT for me. I really like the multi facet gameplay loop. Harvest while managing resources and trying to survive the night. It is such a fun loop. This is a great break game to play or come back to in-between other major titles. [/quote] ──────────────────── [h2]Judgement - 8/12 ★[/h2]