Determining whether this game deserves recognition is tough. The basic design is solid and I know I'll be playing it long enough to nab all the achievements. However, what brings it down is that it's a super grind that eventually relies completely on regular player input and RNG to make progress.

Simple idea -- mine resources, then sell them for cash to get more miners or buy blueprint schematics to improve a drill that allows you go deeper and find more valuable stuff. Resources have a dual purpose as they are required to build the drill parts, too. So grind for minerals, sell them, buy upgrade plans, grind for more mats. It works.

Where this game fails is when that core loop no longer applies. Get deep enough and eventually the vendors no longer have new blueprints for sale. All upgrades for the game must then be acquired by collecting treasure chests that are found randomly by your miners. These chests despawn after a set period, so they cannot accumulate over time. If your materials inventory becomes full, miners stop working and therefore they stop looking for chests. Further, chests cannot be stored or collected with any form of in-game or external automation; a player must check in on their game every few minutes to scroll through their massive mine and manually click a chest to open it. In short -- if a player stops interacting with the game regularly, progress slows to a halt. And that's assuming that the randomized chest contents provide something useful to progress... the high majority of the time, the rewards equate to minimal amounts of extra cash. Gotta get lucky to find something truly valuable.

The problems grow the deeper you go. Eventually, a battle mechanic opens up where you fight monsters. The opportunity for battles is random just like treasure chests (though they do appear more frequently) and must be initiated manually. The fight mechanic is to watch a progress bar grow to full upon which you click a button to attack and then watch the bar fill up again. This is another process that cannot be automated in any form, so if you want to fight you must be playing. You can earn more weapons to watch and click multiple progress bars over time, but these too are earned randomly through chests and fights, requiring luck & 100% player intervention to find them. Weapons can be upgraded to charge up faster and perform greater damage, but the requirements quickly become so steep that you must grind out absurd amounts of money to do so and then wait anywhere between hours or even multiple days before they're ready for use.

I think this game is confused on what it wants to be overall. Granted, it's originally from 2012 and genre staples were not norm at that time. But I can't give it a pass in this age. Too many of the designed mid-late game systems require immense amounts of player interaction, while simultaneously there are some roadblocks where there's practically nothing that players can do to earn the resources except sit around and wait for days on end. It's exciting to open a chest and find a meaningful item that can speed up progression, but the amount of time and input demanded of players between those moments is agonizingly slow. All absence of built in automation only exasperates the issues.

In these early days after their remastered release, the devs have been active and responsive to the players. There's new content and objectives, and they have plans to do more over time. I do not know if their goals will impact any of the flaws I see in their product. At this point, my review is that it sucks to have an idle game running and to feel forced to interact with it every couple minutes hoping to find a needle in a haystack. If forms of automation for chest collection & battles are included in the future (or new vendors are added to simplify the acquisition of blueprints & weapons), my tune might change considerably.

Until then... scroll scroll, clicky clicky, grind grind, hope hope, groan groan.

Determining whether this game deserves recognition is tough. The basic design is solid and I know I'll be playing it long enough to nab all the achievements. However, what brings it down is that it's a super grind that eventually relies completely on regular player input and RNG to make progress. Simple idea -- mine resources, then sell them for cash to get more miners or buy blueprint schematics to improve a drill that allows you go deeper and find more valuable stuff. Resources have a dual purpose as they are required to build the drill parts, too. So grind for minerals, sell them, buy upgrade plans, grind for more mats. It works. Where this game fails is when that core loop no longer applies. Get deep enough and eventually the vendors no longer have new blueprints for sale. All upgrades for the game must then be acquired by collecting treasure chests that are found randomly by your miners. These chests despawn after a set period, so they cannot accumulate over time. If your materials inventory becomes full, miners stop working and therefore they stop looking for chests. Further, chests cannot be stored or collected with any form of in-game or external automation; a player must check in on their game every few minutes to scroll through their massive mine and manually click a chest to open it. In short -- if a player stops interacting with the game regularly, progress slows to a halt. And that's assuming that the randomized chest contents provide something useful to progress... the high majority of the time, the rewards equate to minimal amounts of extra cash. Gotta get lucky to find something truly valuable. The problems grow the deeper you go. Eventually, a battle mechanic opens up where you fight monsters. The opportunity for battles is random just like treasure chests (though they do appear more frequently) and must be initiated manually. The fight mechanic is to watch a progress bar grow to full upon which you click a button to attack and then watch the bar fill up again. This is another process that cannot be automated in any form, so if you want to fight you must be playing. You can earn more weapons to watch and click multiple progress bars over time, but these too are earned randomly through chests and fights, requiring luck & 100% player intervention to find them. Weapons can be upgraded to charge up faster and perform greater damage, but the requirements quickly become so steep that you must grind out absurd amounts of money to do so and then wait anywhere between hours or even multiple days before they're ready for use. I think this game is confused on what it wants to be overall. Granted, it's originally from 2012 and genre staples were not norm at that time. But I can't give it a pass in this age. Too many of the designed mid-late game systems require immense amounts of player interaction, while simultaneously there are some roadblocks where there's practically nothing that players can do to earn the resources except sit around and wait for days on end. It's exciting to open a chest and find a meaningful item that can speed up progression, but the amount of time and input demanded of players between those moments is agonizingly slow. All absence of built in automation only exasperates the issues. In these early days after their remastered release, the devs have been active and responsive to the players. There's new content and objectives, and they have plans to do more over time. I do not know if their goals will impact any of the flaws I see in their product. At this point, my review is that it sucks to have an idle game running and to feel forced to interact with it every couple minutes hoping to find a needle in a haystack. If forms of automation for chest collection & battles are included in the future (or new vendors are added to simplify the acquisition of blueprints & weapons), my tune might change considerably. Until then... scroll scroll, clicky clicky, grind grind, hope hope, groan groan.