You Know the Drill Review (PC)

It didn’t take a great deal of time for me to fall back into old habits with You Know the Drill. In a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, I did know the proverbial drill, as did I know how the earth would react after I spent just enough time chiseling through copious amounts of ore. In fact, I understood the game long before it landed on the radar. Like A Game About Digging a Hole, Backyard Digger, or iDigging, I knew for a fact that, before I could so much as sample the earth and skiffle the rocks, the assignment would primarily consist of wheedling through various ores, upgrading tools, and harvesting natural rarities to convert into prominent jewels of some kind. That much was clear. I only hoped that it had a little more to offer than a simplified version of a common mineral-based digging game.

You Know the Drill lived up to its promise without having to bat an eyelid. From the beginning, it seemed almost too obvious, that the general premise of the game was to, well, dig. And to an extent, that’s all that it was: guiding a drill through a labyrinth of mud and murky brown gristle, and foraging for ores to bring back to an upgrade table. A handful of rocks and sunken rarities later, and it would open up a node on the tree—a perk, if you will, that would allow you the opportunity to enhance your mining skills, as well as collect even greater ores. It was predictable, yet also oddly satisfying. The drill would plant its teeth into the soil, and you, being the puppeteer, would extract the minerals and repeat the same process over and over again. Admittedly, it left a lot to be desired, but it also managed to curb a craving for liminal expression and incremental changes.

At no point was I ever truly wowed by You Know the Drill. With a minimalistic aesthetic and an arcade-like gameplay style, it made no real effort to keep me on tenterhooks over the course of the journey. Instead, it gave me the bare necessities—a power drill and a lot of soil—and it scooted me along the beaten path. As its title openly implied, the concept was familiar—easy, even. Ores would unlock tool upgrades, and upgrades would frequently amass a greater yield, and so on and so forth. And to be honest, it was a lot of fun, in an almost pin-headed sense of the word. Satisfying, but never quite compelling.

Of course, the gameplay itself never required a lot of tactical thinking or forward planning to master. In fact, the process of turfing up dirt and collecting ores was a simple and oftentimes mindless exercise that, frankly, never really needed to be explained. In most cases, you would slither and wade through clumps of dirt, whittle down rocks and other materials, and then use your yield to punch out holes in a lofty upgrade tree. The more you mined, the better the upgrade.

Contrary to popular belief, there is a market for games like You Know the Drill. Granted, it falls into a niche category—a field that, if you’re uninterested in snail-like gameplay and incremental hooks, you probably won’t enjoy for any longer than the initial fifteen minutes, give or take. The thing here is that, like the rest of its kin, You Know the Drill is very much a game that you need to spend enough time with in order to truly enjoy. As it is a bit of a monotonous ordeal, it can often take a great deal of time before you’re finally able to sample that sweet, sweet nectar that looms down below the surface. It’s finding the patience to hammer out enough nodes on the upgrade path, that’s the tough part.

Without trying too hard to burst your bubble, I will say that, as far as incremental digging games go, You Know the Drill isn’t one for flaunting complexity or anything that’s even remotely technical. To be honest, it’s about as simple as digging games come, in that it doesn’t force a habit of shoveling extravagant effects down your throat or anything particularly exciting. Instead, it chooses to stick to the basics, with a drill, a seemingly endless corridor of dirt, and an annoyingly satisfying gameplay loop that can leave you wanting more of its ore-riddled riches. But, again, that’s about as much as it gives.

If you’re a fan of digging games, then there’s a good chance that you’ll enjoy funneling out the ores from this particular allotment. That being said, I do think that there are better alternatives for this kind of gig, and not to mention digging games that dare to dig a little deeper into the historical and archaeological aspects of underground culture. You Know the Drill, as irritatingly satisfying as it is, doesn’t quite knuckle in on a lot of the aforementioned aspects, sadly. At times, perhaps, but nowhere near as often as it could.

Don’t get me wrong, there is an entertaining digging game here, despite the fact that it doesn’t necessarily add a lot more to a blueprint that’s clearly already in place. As a simpler, somewhat squashed version of a cult favorite, it clearly gets the job done. However, to call it the best digging game to sprout out from beneath the surface might be a slight exaggeration.

Verdict

You Know the Drill might fall short on architectural supremacy and an intriguing labyrinthine feel, though it does make good with its promise to provide a clean, satisfying, and enjoyable incremental excavation affair that can and probably will appeal to the demographic. It might not be a masterpiece, but it gets the job done with the tools and the ores that it has at its disposal. Frankly, you can’t ask much more than that.

To state the obvious, digging sims are, unfortunately, a dime a dozen in this day and age, and therefore the odds of You Know the Drill appealing to the whole collective are depressingly slim. Nevertheless, we can’t help but digress, for where there are ores to mine and jewels to harvest, there’s usually a prospector who will gladly give a left leg to hold a pickaxe, a vacuum, or, in this case, a drill.