Game starts off fun, with good pacing, then drops the ball near the end. This is strictly my solo play experience.

At the start of the game the pacing feels pretty decent. The dopamine was rolling in, but eventually it just stops. The fun of the game slowly fades, and you just rush to the bottom of the mine ignoring all the mines and minerals so you can beat the campaign. You dig, You get resources, You get your upgrades, You get the mine at the bottom. It doesn't really take that long either. As you progress it gets slower as intended but it gets brutally slow near 1000+ meters and snail pacingly slow at 1500+. It was actually so slow I found myself ignoring the core mechanics of the game and just using explosives since money wasnt a problem anymore, and the cold/heat mechanic is useless and doesnt do anything besides exist to slow you down. It makes you not be able to dig, but u can still use explosives. Digging in your mech, getting upgrades for it, and the entire game being focused around it, you figure using the mech to dig should be pretty strong and pretty influential to the gameplay. The upgrades feel suuuper strong early, and you can actually feel each upgrade doing something beneficial. However when the missions start to require to get to 1000+ depth the mech become useless. Explosives are just so much better and incredibly cheap overall. Regardless if you get the skill level shop maxed out or not, explosives are king endgame. They're just too strong, and too cheap. It's not even expensive to buy every item up to max stacked in the game, maybe 100k-250k depending on your stack size limit. But it's over 1,000,000$ per mech part/6 parts at tier 7 and up? To put this into perspective for time consumption you dig down into the depths for your game progress, which early game is kinda slow, but at tier 5/6/7 you can get to 700+ in a few minutes. but at 1000+ you drop off really hard and start slowing down exceedingly slow. You go from several blocks dug per second to maybe 1, maybe 1 block/2 seconds and then its roughly 3 seconds per block near 1700+. Painful. You think the logical thing would be to go and upgrade the mech? No it takes way too long, way too many resources, and all 3 planets at tier 8 and tier 9. The time sink is astronomical to just dig for these upgrades. But when you use an explosive it digs every block in its blast radius immediately and clears rocks you can't dig. Each explosive going from smallest to largest is a 1 thru 4 tile instant dig. You can easily carry 30+ of each type when digging starts to get monotonous. thats 30+60+90+120 depths in an extremely short time. And with there being a limit to the dirt you can dig before full, you can very easily double or triple your depth per trip with explosives. Very helpful and instant progress as well. As it stands for me with max tier 7 gear it takes about 10-15 minutes of just digging straight down to reach 2000+. vs about 6 minutes total using explosives past 1000+. And saving millions of dollars plus material grind time for tier upgrades.

You can beat the game in tier 5/ tier 6 mech gear with explosive minmaxing, making the grind for tier 7+ just for achievo hunters, but the grind is painful and boring. Part of the fun was finding the new materials and figuring out how far down you can go. But once you reach 1000+ the game just doesn't have anything left to offer besides post campaign gear material that you can't use much because you just beat the game. You should have every material unlocked when you beat the campaign but there are other maps to finish after. Exploring in the game is pointless once the campaign is over since there is nothing new besides getting mines for faster idle mining progress. And the auto mines are incredibly strong as well. You can mine end game material for tier 9 gear at a whopping 0.3seconds per mineral acquired and get over 500+ from a maxed out mine. But mining them directly gives you up to 8 and you have to find them. I get the appeal of the these two things being meant to help with QoL in the game. But they're just way too good to even bother actually doing the core function of the game, digging. Why bother upgrading the mech when you can just use explosives to get everywhere faster. Why bother mining materials end game when the mine can get those pesky super hard items in a fraction of the time it takes you to dig to them, upgrade the mech to be able to mine them, and also find them and pray for good combo rng. It just doesn't feel right to play an active digging game and just sit afk for the minerals you desperately need for your tier 7 or 8 or 9 and then wait again for the next part. You could go down and mine them yourself while waiting but it's also not fun digging the end game material when you are so slow in the mech. Everything in this game that is NOT your mech is just so absurdly strong it feels like you are being punished for using the mech for the end game.

I did enjoy the game, but the more I played it the more it kept getting tedious and annoying to do anything. The cold/heat is a useless feature that just stops you from playing the game as intended. Even with maxed out upgrades you can only be inside it for a few seconds before becoming useless. You can clear the hot/cold feature, but only for 100-200 depth at a time, then rinse repeat until you are at the bottom where you can... turn it off forever... for free? Absolute waste of time to bother setting up the building and the power lines to clear out the weather, when all you have to do is get to the bottom with explosives and disable it for free. Both of these weather features do the exact same thing meaning there is literally no difference between the ice map or lava map besides the skin of it. It all plays the same. All three maps are exactly the same, just digging in a straight line down. There are no repercussions in the game, nothing to watch out for, nothing to prepare for, no materials that cant be dug if under geared. It's just dig a line down simulator. The later world's have almost no dialog for beating them. And the final tier 4 zone actually has zero dialog for beating it. Not even a cheesy joke like the others have. When you beat the game you get a new thing which helps you gather materials faster for the achievement hunters, but for people who are only looking for a quick game completion it's pretty useless. And to make it worse it also applies to the auto mines so it's even more incentive to not even actively play when you beat the game.

There is no objective besides digging down to the bottom and your reward is one single auto mine, when the maps have 3 or 5 or 10 total per tier on them. The auto mine is nice but there is no reason to explore once you beat the level, all the resources from one zone are on the next higher zone making all previous zones obsolete once beaten. There is hardly any sense of exploration, virtually none once you beat a zone. And the objective of the game is to restore the worlds resources, but there is nothing in the game to actually show that you are doing this. You restore the worlds resources by setting up auto mines to take resources away from the planet and trade these for mech gear blueprints. But we are strip mining the planet for materials in the name of restoring the ecosystems? And to make it more confusing there is an NPC that shows up and begs you to set up auto mines because their home has no more resources, but the auto mines only feature is to mine and take resources away. Am I missing a joke or something here? Also the 4th zone on the starter planet has the same depth as the 3rd zone, with nothing extra special added to it. It really is just an exact same version of the 3rd zone with a different backdrop. There are no 4th zones on the other planets. I'm sure the game will keep getting updates but as of right now the mid game/endgame/post game is severely lacking.

A simple, easy to play game, where you can never lose or run out of time or mess up or do anything but progress inexorably forward. There's a mech building aspect to it, but the aspect is just upgrading and upgrading with no strategy or need for variance. Just make more money to buy better parts to mine more elements to make more money, etc.

Maybe that's all you're looking for. If you like cookie clicker, you'll probably like this. I was hoping for a little big of strategy personally.

Def more challenging and dynamic than the first. Still fun and silly dialogue.