Dig-N-Rig is Worth Digging Up

Me neither.  Dig-N-Rig is a game straight out of the Digipen Institute, where “resource management with creative building” are the key fundamentals.  Have you played a game like Minecraft?  This review may sound familiar.

• + Colorful and delightful 8-bit visuals.
• + Having tools for every occasion.
• + Quick reward schedule of getting minerals and items from those materials.
• + Compulsive play.
• + Space!*
  
• - Poorly executed tutorial.
• A fix: Give aesthetic care to the delivery of information, or edit the knowledge into a more efficient form.
• - Unrestrained upgrade system, upsetting game balance.
• A fix: Set scales ensuring proper capping of abilities and/or escalation of environment hazards.

Dig-N-Rig has a slippery start.  The first five to ten minutes of the game consist of paging through tutorial slide after tutorial slide.  This wouldn’t be half-bad if the information wasn’t a jumble of hard-to-read text randomly popping up everywhere on the screen.  I’m still not sure I managed to read them all, as tutorial textboxes easily blend with the pixelated background.  Don’t take from this that the visuals are unappealing; they’re not.  Very cool, in fact, for this 8-bit title!

Getting through the tutorial, the game does not try to burden the player with a convoluted narrative or crazy objective.  You are digging down to the center of the Earth for scientific study and exploration.  There.  Past that, go down, mining and building what you please with the boat-load of material you uncover behind nearly every bit of rock so those materials can be used to build even more cool stuff.  Repeat on the next play-through.

The player has a wealth of tools that aid in navigating down to the core.  Drills cut terrain like a knife through butter, but only if they are designed for a specific piece of ground (i.e. dirt drills manage dirt, rock drills blast rock, etc.).  These devices are fun to play with, but I found myself coming back to the rock drill time and again, for it doesn’t stop when it hits a barrier, only meagerly slowing down.  And bombs?  They’re good on the first play-through, but after a few upgrades to the rocket-propelled bazooka bullet, firing that beast makes all other blasting object obsolete.

Despite anything that I have said here that may be a strike against Dig-N-Rig, this game is compulsive.  You can lose hours of an evening scraping-up every last colorful jewel between your base of operations and the end.  You can finish in a fairly straight-forward fashion, and you become overpowered within a few upgrades, but again and again you’ll find yourself carving a complex path down into Earth’s depths.

Dig-N-Rig has holes (see what I did there?), needs a bit more content, and just feels like a game that almost was.  Looking at it from the point of it being a student project, however, this game is a blast.  It’s not a title to kill an entire day, but if viewed as a prototype or a proof-of-concept, Dig-N-Rig does just fine.  Now, what’s my suggestion?  Give this game a play.  Take care to checkout the gallery over at Digipen, too; you won’t be disappointed!

* Hint.