Mining games have always had a special place in my heart. There’s something so satisfying about digging through a wall without knowing what’s on the other side, and being rewarded with a rare material. I also happen to be a huge fan of sci-fi, especially if it’s set in outer space. Spaceships and lasers are cool as hell, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Imagine my joy when I noticed a new game coming out called “Cosmodrill“, developed by Morse Morse Games – a sci-fi game set in space with mining at the forefront. The premise is obviously right up my alley, but does it also deliver on being fun?
Easy to learn, easy to master
I cannot understate how easy Cosmodrill is to pick up and play. The spaceship you control is simple, with thrusters in the back and a huge drill in the front. There aren’t a lot of controls, but they’re all intuitive. You control your ship by aiming with your mouse where you want to go, and automatically start drilling when a surface is hit.
Later on, you start unlocking “gadgets” that function as abilities for your spaceship. These range from evasive dashes to material scanners. Three can be equipped at a time and are each assigned to a key. They’re all fairly simple and, again, intuitive to use.
Everything can be upgraded using materials you mine, and while it’s a nice way to incentivise mining, I didn’t find the upgrades necessary to beat the game. The combat comes down to you flying face first into enemies to drill them into pieces, but enemies are too passive and die in one hit to make it much of a challenge.
Nothing in Cosmodrill is much of a challenge actually, and it’s all just a little too simple. While everything is intuitive and easy to learn, it’s too shallow in its mechanics to allow for meaningful improvement in the player’s skills.
So much juice!
Cosmodrill is juiced to the max. Although the game isn’t deep, it’s definitely polished. Everything in Cosmodrill feels amazing to do – to the point where I often forgot how easy it was. Morse Morse Games truly understands how to make even the smallest interactions feel great.
Drilling feels nice and chunky while also not taking forever. Killing enemies is also insanely satisfying, as you often enter slow-motion while drilling through them, with an awesome explosion at the end to top it off.
Music and sound effects are also great, and fit the setting and whatever you’re doing. The sound design is especially good and accompanies all of the visual effects perfectly. While the game is simple at its core, all of the juice and polish makes everything flow really well.
Way too little content
The biggest letdown with the game is how short it is – even with the recent update that adds more content. I managed to do pretty much everything in the main campaign in about 2 hours. That’s with a lot of the optional content completed as well. Had I gone right for the main objectives, I could’ve probably beaten it in an hour or less.
With how little depth there is to the combat – even with gadgets – there isn’t much reason to replay the campaign either. If builds were more interesting and you were presented with more meaningful choices, I’d have loved to play through the game multiple times.
A recent update addresses the lack of content by adding a new mission mode where you complete timed missions and, based on how fast you are, rewards you with stars you can use for upgrades. There are 12 missions in this gamemode, and they all take a few minutes at most. It only took me about an hour to beat all of the missions in the new gamemode with max stars.
Even with the new gamemode, there’s just far too little content in the game. It feels like it ends before it truly gets started, and it’s such a shame, as the foundation here is really good.
Conclusion
Cosmodrill is insanely polished, to the point where I wish some of the time spent polishing it, would instead have been used adding more content and depth to the gameplay. What’s here feels great, but it feels more like a tech demo for something bigger, rather than its own thing. Nothing here is bad, just lacking, and so I hope Morse Morse Games will put in the work to expand on the campaign and combat.
