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Drill Core Review

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Drill Core

WARNING WARNING, This Base Building Roguelite is very addictive! It has no missable achievements and completion takes around 35 hours or more. It is still in early access so more content will be added later on.

Steam

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 35 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 7/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Not yet
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, for now, getting to level 50 is grindy but it will be less grindy when more content there will be added during the game during Early Access
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: Yes, there is an achievement to finish a run in 10 days. This isn’t too hard on an easy level
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Hard question, not really but you’ll have to complete higher difficulties to get enough currency for upgrades
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

The warning above is a bit of a joke but also so true. This review is a bit late because every time I think about Drill Core, I just want to play it! They made this base building/roguelite/colony sim so addictive!

You manage a drilling mission in which your objective is to trill X amount of meters into the ground. While drilling you find curreny to increase your guns that will fight off enemies at night, but are also needed to improve your skills to dig deeper. You kind of want to drill as fast as possible to the next level, but you have to find the right currency to drill deeper and you still can use the other currencies as well. So it is a bit of a balancing act of getting strong enough to still fight off the enemies during the night while also upgrading everyone to work faster.

On your drill platform, you can build different types of buildings. The more buildings for units you have, the more people you can higher, but the more buildings for upgrades you have the higher you can upgrade your builders. You can build on top of other buildings, so space isn’t that limited. However, the higher the building is the more it costs to build it.

There are 3 types of currencies that will be rewarded at the end of missions and can be found during the mission. Those are needed to buy permanent upgrades. The first two types (Yellow and Green) are quite easy to get, but getting purple is a bit of a struggle. My level is so much higher than the upgrades I can buy. It feels like too much of a struggle to get the purples.. on the other hand, I keep playing so it isn’t that demotivating to not get enough of the purple currency.

Another thing you’ll unlock is the ability to find different buildings during a run. there are objectives to complete on specific difficulties and when you complete those, that type of building can show up during your runs. I found this very addictive and kinda wish there were more challenges for each difficulty, but having so many more buildings to the pool of random buildings wouldn’t be nice. I would love to see more challenges but then for the permanent upgrade currencies.

A lot of the achievements you’ll unlock by just playing the game, hiring people, leveling up your platform. Some achievements are grindy at the moment, like the level 50 platform, but with more content it will be less of a struggle. Also the achievement for reaching day 150 underground is grindy at this moment, especially since you can’t save during a run atm. which means you have to keep playing or pause the game while you’re not at your pc for this one. I hope and expect that there will be a save option during missions added later on. This challenge will also be easier the more upgrades you have unlocked.

I will say the game feels already so feature complete but each run can kinda feel the same. looking forward to seeing some different stuff added and more biomes to explore. And maybe even a menu to hide some buildings from your pool of available buildings during a run, like Vampire Survivor has that option.

I give Drill Core 5 out of 5 stars.

Publisher:
TinyBuild Logo

Developer:
Hungry Couch Games Logo

This review for Drill Core was written on 16 September 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 52 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.

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