Drill Core: Drill your way to victory!

Time to dig, dig, dig into the deep with Drill Core. You’re in the business of terraforming planets, and you must drill down to the planet’s core for money and success. Build a colony on your platform from 1 of 3 factions in this rogue-lite strategy game. Can you make a profit for the company? Can you survive the night? And most importantly, can you tear yourself away from this game?

Drill Core is a game that’s simple in its premise: use your platform to mine your way down through a planet to collect resources. However, each run is different, with what buildings and perks become available for you. By digging down, you will accrue resources to upgrade your platform and hire more miners, as well as some that carry over into the main menu. These can then be used to unlock new factions, permanent upgrades for your platform, and your management across all aspects of your gameplay. While the premise may be simple, there are a LOT of things to juggle, so I’ll break things down.

You start off with the regular human miners, who are the most well-rounded, with an easy-to-understand setup and a reliance on machinegun turrets. Next up are the Dwarves, who rely on explosives, dealing big damage to blocks and creatures. They’re great, but take up two slots each in your miner loadout. They primarily use explosive turrets like rocket launchers. The final faction is the Swarminids, absolutely delightful little creatures that only take up half a miner slot each but also rely on larvae and spare blocks to hatch. They use energy turrets like lasers and are a LOT of fun. They were, by far, my favourite faction to play as.

The Swarminid platform in the mineshaft with 4 tiers of buildings above it and turrets lining the shaft walls. Drill Core

Dig through the day and survive the night when the Terrorbores attack, giant worms that can wipe out your whole squad underground. Do you retreat to the safety of the platform or remain in the mine to try and dig that little bit further? All this while creatures from the surface descend to destroy your drill’s core. Protect yourself with turrets placed up the mineshaft, utilising defensive buildings and abilities. After certain lengths of time, a boss will appear, depending on which planet type you’re on, where you must fight your hardest to beat them back and survive. This leads to some very tense moments where you’re on the verge of death, desperately trying to upgrade things.

Game screen of a large insect descending a mineshaft at night to attack your platform, red and covered with many eggs and eyes. Drill Core

While completing contracts, you can also unlock “Qualifications”, unlocking new buildings by completing certain additional objectives such as surviving with less than 20% core health, having over 20 miners at the end of a contract, or reaching a certain depth. They aren’t imperative, and you can often pair qualifications that you think can be completed more easily together. Some Qualifications are locked behind qualifiers such as difficulty levels and planet types, so be careful what you’re picking out. The buildings you unlock can be very helpful, though, so they’re well worth your time and add a bit of extra spice to gameplay, trying to complete a qualification at the same time as your current contract.

Finally, you gain experience points for completing each contract. There are three things that level up: your level, your platform’s level per faction, and which department you join. There are six departments that offer their own building and cash rewards for levelling them up, which can also make some big changes to gameplay. By levelling up your platforms, you can unlock levels of their skill trees to purchase passive buffs and extra slots for more starting buildings. Leveling yourself up allows you to purchase more upgrades for improving your gameplay across all factions. All these upgrades use the same currency, so spend wisely!

The Player upgrade skill tree showing checkmarked purchased upgrades as well as the unlock paths and cost for new upgrades, with unavailable ones being highlighted red. Drill Core

As you can see, there’s a lot to manage in Drill Core, but while it may seem daunting at first glance, it’s actually quite easy to balance. You can only purchase upgrades between contracts, so simply choose a contract, the two qualifications you want to attempt, and have fun. Once the contract is completed, you can browse the upgrade trees to see if anything has unlocked, spend your resources, or decide to save for that next upgrade you really want. It slips in between sessions quite easily, so you can separate the management and mining sides of the gameplay to focus on only 1 at a time.

Drill Core’s graphics are sterling with a gorgeous pixel art style that oozes character. The music is pretty good, but the little voice lines by miners and the company AI assistant add some much-needed levity to the sometimes monotonous gameplay. However, after a while, even those can’t save things, and eventually I took to it as a second screen game with something up on my other monitor.

Human miners in the depths. Various rock types are shown with what's inside them and blocks highlighted orange to denote them as mining targets. Drill Core

All told, Drill Core is a lot of fun, and I found myself thoroughly addicted to it for over 50 hours. The gameplay does eventually begin to wear thin, but there’s plenty to get your teeth into to get your money’s worth. While it may seem daunting how many things there are to manage, it breaks down to be far simpler than it initially seems. I’d recommend it as a great second-screen game to unwind with that provides enough tension to keep you engaged without being overly mentally taxing.