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.

Deus Ex – A Human Revolution

 I was going to name this post, “Deus Ex – A Gaming Revolution,” but that’s too easy.  Deus Ex: Human Revolution is really a remarkable game of depth and design; what a swell time it was to play.

Let me just say that Deus Ex is a massively deep game; many levels to any structure, hidden paths, trinkets everywhere, and a solid stealth game built around a story of depth truly make this title one deserving of the many award nominations it received last year.  The designers orchestrated a living, breathing world in the near future.  This soon-to-be reality has issues of its own, very real issues that are only beginning to rear ugly heads in today’s news and science.

The world of Deus Ex provides the perfect setting for the tale that is played out.  Cyber warfare, mainstream hacking, devious corporate espionage, mega structures, class inequality, and global plots grip the player in a fiction that is readily understandable.   Even grander than the plotline is the fiction that can be discovered throughout the environment that, if read, can affect choices you make in the game because of the foreshadowing now bestowed upon the player.  Oh, and the motives for the powers-that-be are most certainly not as clear as they’d have the player believe them to be!

While delving into the lore provided in D.E.H.R., the tasks required to progress the story can be accomplished by any number of fashions.  Decide to sneak into the police HQ through the roof?  Or crawl through the sewers?  Or just blow-away the cops that block your way?  The secret paths opened by certain unlocked abilities grant even more paths.  Just the take-downs offer choices in whether to brutally destroy the enemy or put them into an abrupt sleep.  But, every option given is also given with a number of risks, consequences, and rewards for the player’s hard work – 30 minutes spent to get from one floor to another is something to expect for a stealth player; 2 minutes of quick-footed shootout with much respawning is the road of the combatant.

Once the smoke clears and the bodies are hid, there looks to be some issues concerning some of the visual deliveries of the game.  At times, I was impressed enough with the feeling that I was watching a top-notch film, the story being rendered beautifully before my screen.  At others, however, the poor mouth movements, stiff ligaments, and pasty skins made me think one thing: why are some games, even now, still needing to catch-up to the characters of the humble-FPS Half Life 2???

Shying away from the sheer points of gameplay interests within Deus Ex, I must admit that I was greatly distracted by the sheer many points of interest within the game world itself.  A great number of hours were spent picking through every drawer, reading each lost eBook, and grabbing every piece-of-junk that could be scoured from locked offices and alleys.  Deus Ex: Human Revolution is certainly a time-sink for those players who enjoy eating-up every word of lore, discovering the most hidden locales, and gathering each piece of gear that packrats love.

I had a great time playing a game that is a solid stealth, lore strewn adventure I’ve engaged in.  Ever an engagement, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game that takes the next steps of human revolution of choices in a tight-sneak game, while pushing the envelopes of storytelling to new realms that will hopefully be making an appearance in future titles.  While many hours may be sent into the experience, nearly every hour will be enjoyable for any lover of games with a sense of depth; how deep the player goes, though, is ultimately their choice.  Take care with your decisions.

• + The feel, at times, of living in a box office movie.
• + Tight, well versed controls.
• + One of the best stealth experiences there is.
• + Plenty of story within a living world of depth.
• + Get as many hours and events in a play-through as desired.
• - Pasty stiffness inherit in all characters.
• A fix: Include more checkpoints to ensure better graphical quality.
• - Unmentioned, but the load screens are very long for a modern title.
• A fix: Don't attempt to include as much data at one time; dynamically apply content.