Status Reset_Tears Mar 27, 2020
This is one of those games that showed up in a lot of "Hidden Gems" lists for GBA, so I figured I'd give it a go. This is a platformer where your combat, puzzle-solving, and travel all revolve around drilling. Unlike Mr. Driller, the girl in this game pilots a mech walker with a giant drill attachment, surely a drill …
This is one of those games that showed up in a lot of "Hidden Gems" lists for GBA, so I figured I'd give it a go. This is a platformer where your combat, puzzle-solving, and travel all revolve around drilling. Unlike Mr. Driller, the girl in this game pilots a mech walker with a giant drill attachment, surely a drill to pierce the heavens. I found all the new ways the game kept coming up with for using that drill to be quite ingenious -- this is definitely an example of a game that took a concept and pushed it as far as they could, in every way imaginable. The pixel art for this one is also really nice and colorful; the girl and her chunky mech are very cute.
Unfortunately, Drill Dozer became tiresome very quickly, and I wasn't a fan of many of its game design decisions. For example, the music is monotonous -- the songs all sound rather samey, and every time you get your third main power-up (there are three in every level) it plays the same victory tune... and it keeps going on and on, because you usually have loads of stage left to do still with that third power-up. I also didn't like how the entire screen fills with a drill level UI text/graphics every time you use your drill... which is basically non-stop the entire game. (You also get to hear that tinny dentist drill noise basically non-stop the entire game.) And while the game had some solid platforming puzzles to work out, I was not a fan of your sidekick characters telling you at great length how to do every single little thing every step of the way. I get that you don't want the kids to not know what to do, but this is way too much dialogue for a game that doesn't really need any of it. Also, the levels drag on way too long -- which seems counter-intuitive for a kid's handheld game. These levels can last a half hour! Bite-sized stages would've worked much better here.
Bottom line: a clever game, but really tedious to play after a while.
