XNA Game Review: Miner Dig Deep
Title: Miner Dig Deep
Creator: Robir
Genre: Action & Adventure
Price: 200 Points
Countries: Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English
Publisher’s Description
Dig and expand your mine to find greater treasures from the depths. Build the deepest mine so you can make your fortune in rare gems and metals from the earth below.
What We Think:
As could be expected, the Xbox Live Games Community’s contributions to the Xbox Live catalog are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because they provide fresh, unorthodox ideas that might spark some creativity for the bigger developers who seem stuck on forever improving the textures of First Person Shooters. A curse, because a lot of sub par, unstable junk just slips through the cracks – likely developers who think that just getting on to the Xbox Marketplace will somehow pay their rent and not realizing that quality stands for a whole lot. Unfortunately this dilution makes it less and less appealing to wade through the onslaught of new titles not to mention it destabilizes an otherwise rock solid game platform. (Oh don’t start the ring of death is like, last-century news).
For this very reason, when an excellent game does come along, it reminds us that there is still hope. Miner Dig Deep is a great looking game with excellent sound design and music (the soundtrack sounds like a hip Silverlake indie band) and most importantly: the five-second play cycle is perfectly executed – easy to pick up, detailed enough to sustain interest and very responsive to user input.
Far too many developers fail to understand that if a game doesn’t work at the basic control level, if a user does not “get” or feel comfortable with how to puppeteer their avatar, let alone how it looks when it moves, then the rest is irrelevant. Too many games, even those with multi-million dollar budgets fail at this basic level.
Miner Dig Deep has a brief but logical learning curve. It then succeeds at the next flagpole: the five-minute play cycle offers the player opportunities for simple level advancement by virtue of the stickiest game ploy of all – improve your abilities, sell stuff you have found questing for cash with which to upgrade your gear, rinse, repeat – addictive gameplay. Of course this simple formula in and of itself is not enough to make a great game, but in this case, the blend of Dig Dug, N+ problem solving and Arkadian Warriors simple upgrading systems make this one a winner.
At 200 points this is a steal.
Rating: 
Have you played Miner Dig Deep? What were your impressions?
