Galactic Mining Corp

Galactic Mining Corp is one of those games where I don't really know why I like it, and I probably should be doing something better with my time, but I still find myself addictively playing it. Put on some music or your favourite Netflix show, chill out, and start drilling.

A solid 90% of the game is drilling down (or occasionally sideways, maybe even back up if you're feeling fancy) through blocks of many different types of resource on a variety of planets that have different creatures trying to eat you and different damage eroding your ship. The other 10% of the game is clicking upgrade.

You upgrade your blocks, you upgrade the items, you upgrade your crew, and your rooms, and your drill (in many different ways). There's a huge upgrade tree from the core pieces you're rewarded with, and there's a big research panel that's basically you just collecting all these items and then clicking to research it. Your upgrades have upgrades, your unlocks have more unlocks.

And that's it. That's the game. You build rooms, you hire crew, you collect things and you drill. Then you repeat until you've achieved 100% achievements (since there's no story, I'm marking that as the endgame, since you'll have unlocked and upgraded everything.) There's no way to lose; even if you get eaten by a weird alien monster, you don't lose your resources. There's no way to go backwards in progression. It's as casual as casual gets.

Are you already bored reading this review? Then you won't enjoy this game. And that's okay, it's not going to be for everyone.

For me though, there's a zen-like charm to the addictive progressive gameplay loop. The art style is colourful and charming and I adore the character art on the crew - very creative and unique so I enjoy unlocking the next room or crew. I like collecting things. I like upgrading things. I like seeing my money go up. I like achievements. Galactic Mining Corp hits the sweet spot of "I didn't really do anything but I enjoyed doing it anyway and now I feel more relaxed." Any video game that I can close out of feeling more chill these days gets a thumbs up from me.

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I found this too boring for me but I can't find it in myself to give a negative review.

There's a lot of love here, just not my thing.

Refunded.

Is it possible to make a fun game around a core boring mechanic?

Overview
Galactic Mining Corp is a collectathon game where you explore multiple sectors of a galaxy in search for minable objects. Once you discover them, you can land on them (usually they are big asteroids or moons) and start digging to reach their cores and collect them. Digging is done through a drillship that also takes damage while piercing through the harder layers of ground, so you’ll have to find the safest path to the core. Oh, and in the meanwhile you also have to manage a Galactic Mining Corporation!

Managing a GMC Takes a Lot of Work
The main goal of GMC is, putting it simply, to upgrade every single aspect of your corporation. Being a collectathon game at its core, basically everything in GMC is upgradable, given that you have a certain amount of the required resource. Upgrading your HQ allows you to have more rooms, but it requires corporation experience. More rooms let you acquire more workforce, which must also get unlocked by completing special contracts in the exploration panel. Then, the single workers can be upgraded when they gather enough experience, making everything an endless levelling. This levelling brings, above all, increased stats for your drill, which allows it to drill faster and for longer in the harsh environments of the different big space rocks.

While the game features many different resources (including every tile that you dig, but more on this later), the most important is hands down the cores you will find at the center of the different space rocks you will dig. The core will allow you to unlock increased stats and, most importantly, new galactic sectors and increased size for your HQ. Along with cores, we can unlock new rooms using the research function of our corporation, which allows us to transform an accumulated resource type into progress to the next new room.

Dig, Die, Repeat
We reach now the main loop of the game on which everything is built around. Every upgrade you build on your HQ, every character you upgrade and (almost) every research you make is aimed at improving your performances in the digging sessions of the game. Digging start when you discover a minable space object in the exploration panel. This panel is divided into many tiles which can be destroyed, for a gold fee, allowing you to see if something is under them. I strongly believe exploration is something the developers could have improved the game mechanics a little, maybe introducing a ship movement range that could’ve been improved with upgrades, instead of a gold threshold to reach to “explore” a tile that could have nothing behind it.

After exploring the sector a little bit, you’ll surely find a space object you can land on and start digging. Once you do, you will quickly see of the core aspect of the game is, simply put, too shallow and repetitive, especially for the main loop of the game. Digging involves a planet map divided into many different little tiles you can dig with your drillship. Every tile has a gold value, which is the gold you’ll earn when destroying it, and a resistance value which represents how long will it take to destroy that tile. The more resistant the tile, the more hp your drillship will lose when digging that tile. It is thus important to find the safest path to the core without digging through particularly resistant materials. Every planet will also have some special boon tiles which will allow you to trigger different effects, like healing your ship, extending your vision range for a few seconds or increasing the gold earned at the end of the mission.

The problem is that digging through tons of different tiles just isn't fun enough. It would be ok for a side minigame inside a bigger and more complex gameplay, but this is literally the main activity of GMC. Click, watch your ship destroy the tile, repeat until your ship loses all hp. The special boon tiles and monsters that inhabit the depths of the different space objects try to create some differentiation, but quickly become boring after seeing them a bunch of time in different planets.
Even enemies quickly become repetitive and boring after a while. This is due to their simple implementation in the game, which usually only allows them to move around in very predictable ways and destroy blocks.

Verdict
Initially I feared that I wasn’t understanding the game properly, but after a good amount of hours I can definitely say that I made my mind about Galactic Mining Corp: I would definitely enjoy the tons of different upgrades and long game replayability IF the game’s main gameplay loop was an enjoyable experience. But it just isn’t. It feels to me that more effort was put into making the game longer through the many upgrade mechanics, than into the core gameplay and what it has to offer. A real shame, especially considering that the title offers good art and, again, great longevity.

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