Bore Blasters review

“I’m Gonna Make You Mine”, 8BitSkull boasts.

While there are people who dig shallow holes in the ground for fun, hobby tunneling can become an obsession. In California’s Mojave Desert, a man known as William “Burro” Schmidt spent 38 years drilling a 2,087-foot tunnel through solid granite.

Although I can’t come close to topping that distance, I’ve probably spent a sizable amount of time doing simulated excavation. From Ron Longfellow’s Miner! (1980), Dig Dug (1982), Mr. Driller (1999), Terraria (2011) to the pair of SteamWorld Dig titles (2013 and 2017), I rarely miss an opportunity to burrow. There’s something cathartic about mining through the digital ground, forming your own intricate den.

You Know the Drill, Right?

As the title implies, you’ll also be doing quite a bit of digging in Bore Blasters. Developer 8BitSkull lets players pilot a gyrocopter armed with a mammoth machine-gun drill. Tunneling through the game’s biomes channels the play of a twin-stick shooter, as you blast your way through each environment. You’ll etch out pathways large enough for your aircraft to squeeze through and periodically shoot down roving enemies.

Like most mining games, there are plenty of resources to collect. But these materials are always enclosed by different types of land. And while it’s easy to smash through topsoil, you’ll soon encounter resistive rock that requires several shots to punch through.  But there are also some shortcuts, with volatile canisters and stripes of explosive rocks that can clear a large area.

Pleasingly, your copter grabs any precious resources with magnetic attraction, so you won’t have to squander fuel on clean-up duty. And running out of juice is more threatening than the game’s numerous enemies, so watch that meter.

We Must Go Deeper

But the real fun emerges as soon as you fill the preliminary playable character’s gauge. Here, you’ll be able to activate a fast dash, which lets you rip right through the ground for a few seconds. That’s essential for finding one of the uncommon fuel drums scattered around the landscape. Once you’ve reached the bottom of the stage, you’ll often need to find a treasure chest before moving on to the next stage. The dashing skill proves to be invaluable here, with Bore Blasters playfields being remarkably wide.

Expectedly, your weaponry grows increasingly ineffective as you’re forced to dig through denser types of terrain and more plentiful adversaries. But Bore Blaster provides two types of consolations. The first is a Vampire Survivors-style selection of power-ups that are awarded every time you pass certain resource collection thresholds. These might increase the range of your machine gun, firing speed, or offer perks like sporadic depth charges that tunnel through the terrain.

An Increasingly Weak Dollar

There are also the meta-game augmentations that can be purchased with the value of resources that you’ve collected. These permanent upgrades can provide a larger fuel tank, shorten the cooldown time for special abilities, or augment your machine gun. Smartly, Bore Blasters sustains a player’s attention by unlocking new upgrades after clearing stages from the campaign map.

While Bore Blasters is amazingly addictive at first, enjoyment diminishes along with the rate of new copter improvements. Yes, the game adopts a mobile game-style approach, which means that enhancements arrive quick at first. But even with the purchase of improved weaponry, in-game inflation means you’ll be paying exponentially higher prices. Consequently, Bore Blasters can turn into routine. But before it becomes a grind, there’s at least five hours of enjoyment to sink into.

Bore Blasters was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.