I cannot stop playing Drill Core, a brilliantly fun indie strategy game from tinyBuild and Hungry Couch Games. Drill Core 1.0 is launching on July 17 (Steam), but I’ve already sunk many hours into the Early Access version, and loving every minute.
Drill Core blends aspects of tower defense, colony sim, and roguelite, with heavy doses of SteamWorld Dig and Deep Rock Galactic, into a tightly balanced strategy game. Oh, and a dash of satirical late-stage capitalist humor never hurt either!
Rock and Stone
In Drill Core, like Deep Rock Galactic, players are sent to a hostile alien planet to mine for precious minerals.
Every run, or contract, starts with the platform, a tiny base of operations consisting of the core, several workers, and a few open building slots. If the core loses all its hit points, the contract ends in failure — unless we reach the target depth.
The workers include miners, carriers, and guards. Miners dig through blocks the player selects, exploring the underground layer. Carriers carry the exposed minerals back to the core, and guards defeat any insectoid aliens found along the way.
As the player digs through procedurally generated ground, more minerals are found. Iron and Swarmlit can be used to purchase buildings and defensive towers. I can hire additional workers at the barracks, and upgrade their speed and health with the laboratory.
Managing the limited building slots is crucial. More barracks equals more workers, but I’ll also need additional labs to access better upgrades.
Throughout the contract, I’m offered tech upgrades and additional building options. Maybe I’ll get a radar that finds clusters of minerals, or a factory that spawns mineral-carrying drones, or a rocket launcher to help destroy aliens.
Thankfully the platform can be expanded vertically to house additional buildings (for a cost), but the tight economy and limited space makes every purchase a delightfully agonizing decision.
Coal is used as a checkpoint to reach the next depth layer, while other resources are used in the roguelite progression to purchase major upgrades for future runs, such as additional building options or platform upgrades.
Thus, the deeper I dig and more resources I find, the more upgrades I can purchase when it’s all over. But, the alien swarms never stop coming, and grow ever-stronger.
They Mostly Come Out at Night
Drill Core has a strict day/night cycle. During the day, I work to quickly clear as much as the mine as I can, keeping my workers alive and efficiently grabbing resources.
But when night approaches, I order the full retreat, sending everyone back to the platform. The alien swarms infest the mine, killing anyone who still remains there. Flying aliens arrive from above, descending down to the platform to destroy it. It’s time for the tower defense portion of the strategy game!
As with the limited platform buildings, the walls of the descending cave feature limited spots for constructing defensive turrets. I start with only the basic machine gun (for taking out small but fast aliens) and cannon (for slower, larger threats). Eventually I’m offered additional turret options, including slowing-lasers, mortar cannons, and poison guns.
Enemy swarms start off simple and slow, but grow in power, strength, and diversity as the player lingers. Slower aliens can absorb a lot of hits, while fast buggers zoom down to explode and deliver a nasty blow. Some turrets are better against big slow threats, others deal with clusters, and some are better placed higher up, or lower and closer to the core.
Cleverly, my turret slots expand only as I delve deeper into the mine, unlocking additional slots and lengthening the distance between the aliens and my precious platform. This puts pressure on me to always be digging deeper, even though the enemies and hazards in the underground become stronger.
Workers are hilariously fragile, and die easily to discovered aliens, exploding blocks, or fire traps. It costs precious resources to replace them, forcing me to act like a corporate overlord and mutter about how much their ineptitude is costing me.
If we survive the night, day begins and it’s back into the mine. Each contract has a target depth that must be reached to achieve victory, but I’m free to play much longer and acquire boatloads of resources. Each contract also features Qualifications, side quest achievements that unlock additional buildings, as well as multiple departments that unlock more content after successful contract completions.
Drill Core, Inc
Through Early Access, the developers have added additional planet types, as well as the Dwarven Platform. I unlocked the Frozen Planet, which features different aliens with shields that absorb hits, and freezing attacks. Meanwhile, dwarves provide an awesome new wrinkle to the whole experience, with more powerful (and more costly) workers, and miners that use bombs to explode nearby blocks.
The upcoming 1.0 release adds a third platform, more buildings, unique turret upgrades, and more.
Drill Core is already a stellar experience, with a smooth difficulty curve, tense gameplay, and a huge amount of content. It’s destined to become one of my favorite indie games — and strategy games, of the year.
Drill Core will release on Steam on July 17. It’s currently available via Early Access.
