Money makes the world go round. But what about all the other worlds out there? Expand your wealth and satisfy your corporate greed by terraforming, by leading a branch of DrillCore.
Not just mining for resources
Drill Core is the new game developed by Hungry Couch Games and published by tinyBuild. It’s a roguelite base builder where you are a platform manager at the company DrillCore. It’s your job to oversee the drill platform, keep your workers safe and mine the planet for resources to ultimately terraform it. You’re not just mining, you’re safeguarding the future.
But how does all this make sense from a gameplay perspective? Let’s first take a look at the core of the game: the randomly generated runs themselves. Let’s presume that we landed on a planet with the standard race: the humans. When you first set foot on your drill platform, it’s completely empty. So you will need to put on some buildings and fortify your defences. There are a variety of buildings to use in the game, but every platform can choose from three basic ones at the start (assuming we don’t have any upgrades, more on that later). There are the barracks to generate new workers, factories that let you generate a resource after some in-game time and the laboratory where you can buy upgrades for use in this run only. You will also have to place turrets along the walls of the tunnel shaft above your drill platform. You get two for free at the start of a run so choose wisely.
But why would I want to place turrets? That’s because a run is split in two phases: daytime and nighttime. During the day, you send your workers out to mine the planet and gather resources. You highlight blocks where you want to tunnel, and your miners will get to work removing them. If there are resources found, then your carriers will start to move and go fetch them. There may be some stray monsters that pop-up from time to time, but don’t worry. The third minion type: the guard, will take care to dispose of them before they can do too much harm. As you tunnel further and further away from your base, you will find all kinds of resources. But all days come to an end, and the clock at the top right of the screen will run out. Then the next phase begins: the night.
At night swarms of enemies will start to descend from the top of the mineshaft above your platform, in an attempt to take out the terraforming core. Do not be alarmed, it’s not a structured protest. It’s just local wildlife that wants to take you out (I think…). That’s why you need to defend yourself by placing turrets alongside the wall, or build extra buildings that have ways to intercept them. If you survive the night, a new day will come, and you can start the loop all over gain.
And in the interaction between day and night, is where Drill Core truely starts to show its hand. By mining you aren’t only finding resources, you can also find technology underground. These contain bonuses to workers such as increased worker speeds or extra health, but also new buildings to add to your platform. Extra turret types, new building types such as bars, missile towers or even reanimation pods for fallen workers. They are all hidden under the planet’s crust. Some even unlock abilities on cooldown that you can use as the platform manager. Daytime abilities to help with the mining or nighttime abilities to help you dispose of enemies faster.
Mine to find resources, spend them on new or existing tech, survive the night and repeat. But for how long? You do in fact have a condition for winning a run. There is a special resource to power your platform and get to target depth and release your terraforming pod: coal. If you find six pieces of coal, you unlock a move to dig deeper and explore further. And this adds a risk reward system. Do you risk another night to get more resources, or do you want to drill down as fast as possible and cash out quicker? That’s for you to decide…
It’s a business, not a charity
After cashing out and returning to the menu, the whole management side of Drill Core starts. Inside of the menus of this game, there is a lot of customization to be done. There is an upgrade menu to be found here. These upgrades aren’t temporary however, they are convenient options that make your runs more fluent in true roguelite fashion. You can buy options to let your guards patrol routes, take the ability to set priority blocks to destroy first, even unlock new races to play as during runs: the dwarves and the swarmids (each with their own unique gameplay quirks). They will make you feel more powerful in your role as platform manager in no time.
You can also choose extra goals (qualifications) when taking on a mission to get new buildings unlocked to find during your run. For example: if you manage to do a run where you place more than 15 turrets, you get a hospital that heals a random worker every 20 seconds. Don’t you like these tasks, just straight up pay for a building unlocked at the start of your run in the platform customisation menu.
But wait! There is even more! As you do runs, the level of your platform grows. Successful runs give you higher difficulty modes and other worlds to terraform and mine. And you can also select a division of your company to level up. This also unlocks specific buildings or other rewards. The reviving pod I mentioned before for example being one of them.
solid to the core
Drill core isn’t just a strategy game with endless possibilities, it’s a labor of love. Even when I got overwhelmed by the options to choose from, the devs tried to keep me invested and helped guide me through my experience. The game oozes character. From its witty intro to the beautiful pixel graphics it held my drive to explore high.
My only point of criticism would be that runs sometimes take a long time. Mine were mostly between 30 and 50 minutes. This means a poor choice bites you in the ass after a half an hour of going strong and destroys your run, it can get frustrating. I think this is why the corporate emails you get after each run were implemented. To make you laugh or encourage you after a long period ‘off planet’. But don’t get me wrong, failure is still the nature of a roguelite. Being hard isn’t to its detriment. The game was always fun and made me want to jump in for ‘just one more run’. Isn’t that what this genre is all about?Last but not least, I wanted to mention the great gameplay optimization. Resource management games are often best enjoyed with mouse and keyboard, but the game was SteamDeck supported. I tried it out on both my laptop and in handheld mode on SteamDeck and both were equally enjoyable. It’s a hard thing to pull off so congratulations to the devs!
Conclusion
Drill Core is a roguelite base builder that does what a roguelite does best. It offers difficulty in gameplay and reward in failure or success. The customization options within or between runs are endless and make the overall gameplay even more enjoyable after unlocking more buildings, turrets and employee upgraders. The runs that are the core of this game can be long, but this doesn’t deter you from clicking replay even after playing for multiple hours. If you are looking for a game that is easy to pick up but hard to master, I would say Drill Core may be the game for you. It’s available on Steam and even is steam deck supported.
