I wrote the first draft of this one before Drill Core’s early-access version came out, a few weeks ago. The demo is still available at the time of posting, but some minor details might be out of date. If I have enough additional thoughts for a second post, that will come later.

Anyway…

Drill Core is a game in which you’re managing a sci-fi mining base that drills down into an alien planet – yes, the whole base, leaving a big fat hole in the ground. I played the demo for a few hours, and I liked what I saw.

The gameplay goal is to gather metagame currency; the deeper you dig, the more perks you’ll be able to unlock, in classic roguelite fashion. The story goal is to dig deep enough to give the drill-tipped nuke at the center of your base a head start when you send it into the core of the planet you’re on. For, um, reasons.

The art style… it’s that kind of cartoony cuteness that you might recognize from other games as shorthand for sci-fi corporate chicanery. The barracks has an outdoor laundry line; the laboratory looks like a giant brain in a jar.

The gameplay is divided into two parts. During the day you send your miners down under your base to dig for resources. This is fairly safe, as long as you keep a few soldiers around to deal with any eggs that hatch. Oh, the eggs hatch into hostile bug-like aliens that are the size of your miners, give or take, and there are also spawners that create more eggs, flame-throwing blocks, and unstable blocks that can collapse on miners’ heads, but the day is relatively safe.

Then night falls.

First there are the Eater of Worlds-sized worms that cruise around underground; the only thing you can do about them is recall your miners to base until morning. That’s the easy part. The rest of the night features more bugs coming down the big hole you just drilled in their home turf.

They fit with the rest of the art style and look about as horrific as the aliens from Space Invaders, until you notice that they’re bigger than your soldiers. Those are the small ones. The medium-sized ones are bigger than your barracks, and they all want to come down and attack your base’s power core until it blows up right next to you.

So maybe cracking the planet’s core into pieces with a well-placed nuke isn’t a bad idea after all, but you have to survive long enough to accomplish that. That’s what the gun and rocket and laser and minelayer emplacements are for. If you build your defenses right, you can treat those dumb bugs to a reverse bullet hell.

In my few hours of playtime, I found that it looks more difficult than it is, as long as you’re halfway smart about it, keep expanding and upgrading those guns with your available resources, and maybe get the repair building when it comes up as an option, for use after a few bugs live long enough to do a little chip damage to your core. It doesn’t hurt that the first roguelite upgrade adds your soldiers’ firepower to the lower level of gun emplacements, or that the different turrets’ descriptions are very up front about their tactical strengths and weaknesses (like a couple of them flat-out telling you they’re more effective near the top or bottom).

I’ve never been overly attracted to tower defense as a genre – the last one I remember putting any amount of time in was Dungeon Keeper 2 – but this one was all right. And on general principles, I like games that the devs are confident enough about to offer a demo…

I won’t recommend the game fully until after I’ve seen the balance changes they’re talking about and, of course, until after I’ve seen the price. But from what I saw of the demo, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the game is worth a buy.