Drill Dozer (2005)

Drill Dozer is a platformer on GBA, in which, well, you operate a mini drill rig. You play as a character who is part of a group of "drillers" who are bandits or thieves, and you're on the lookout for treasure. The game revolves around finding different colored powerful diamonds and you chasing around some baddies to get back the red diamond they stole from you.

The core mechanic as mentioned in the name is drilling. Your drill dozer (a drill mech of sorts) is your weapon, your transport and how you drill through obstacles throughout the game. In each level, you have to find two gears to gear up to be able to drill faster, stronger and more efficiently, and you break your way through walls and boxes with some platforming precision killing bad guys and fighting stage bosses. Its very Mega Man esque in the sense that you go from stage to stage, fight a boss and progress. You can also buy energy tanks that refill your life similar to the E tanks you find in Mega Man games.

The platforming is actually pretty good. You have to use different techniques to jump to different heights, although it felt very restrictive. For example, there is one water level where your drill acts as a propeller, but you never do it again. There is other mechanics you use only once, throughout the game, which I feel like could be better implemented.

Overall, a decent action platformer. The game has some frustrating quirks and annoyances, but most of those are mitigated by the fact that when you die you can continue right where you leave off, and at full health. If you die at a boss, you can pay 50 credits to revive and at full HP, most of the time can just brute force your way through any issues you were having. Once the game is over, there is an option to do a NG+ of sorts where you buy a stronger drill bit capable of drilling through metal boxes in earlier levels that locked you out of previous areas. There is also some secret stages to unlock so you can find all the treasures and 100% the game. Personally, the game didn't grab me enough to go back and want to do the extra content at the end. I settled with the rank of "treasure bandit" or something after finding 3-5 secrets organically.

This is the third 2-D platformer by Game Freak I've played, the first two being Magical Taruruuto-kun and Pulseman. I think this is my favorite of the bunch!

You control Jill via her Drill Dozer, a miniature little mech with a drill you must power up in each level to achieve its full destructive capability. In practice, this plays like an amalgam of several other games… there's a very lite Metroid feel to having to restore the dozer in every level to access new sections, there are occasional waves of enemies with a beat-em-up vibe, there are platforming challenges using the drill to cling or launch (a la Klonoa's ring) or to alternate rotational direction (which lit up the same parts of my brain as Mighty Switch Force). But everything makes sense together since it's all based on the capabilities of the mech and its drill.

The game's levels are long, but you're allowed to pause and save anywhere (restoring at the last checkpoint) so I wasn't bothered by that. Each is packed with a ton of variety in enemies (both minor and bosses) and platforming challenges, maintaining an impressive degree of tension and surprise throughout.

Drill Dozer can get pretty difficult, but you can use the "chips" you collect in levels to purchase health upgrades, which are mercifully priced. This allowed me to tune the game's difficulty, naturally finding that sweet spot where levels felt challenging but rewarding.

There are some rough patches. The cartridge's rumble feature is a novel gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless. I get the sense that the rest of the game's sound design suffered from the assumption that it would be drowned out by the rumble: The music is repetitive and the sound effects are irritating. And there were a handful of times I needed to consult a walkthrough because it wasn't clear to me how to proceed: Most of the time, the solution was something I doubt I'd ever figure out on my own.

But overall, this is a really fun platformer and a standout in Game Freak's catalog. I don't think it's worth the prices it fetches these days, but the rumble feature isn't essential, so don't feel bad about emulating this one (or playing it on Wii U while the eShop's still up).