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| The Station in Dig Station is a big dig station. |
Dig Station is a game for Android. The blurb states:
"Manage little station on the alien planet. Get upgrades and go for adventures!".
It sounded fun, but one of those statements is a lie.
You start the game with a little dig station, and after a short period of familiarising yourself with the controls (there is no tutorial) you discover the main mechanic of this game - the counter in the top right indicates how much stuff your station has gathered. Soon you discover that you have to upgrade your main drill. Doing so increases the rate at which you get stuff. Everyone likes games where you get progressively better, even if it is just the rate at which you gain yellow numbers, right?
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| One of several upgrades in the game. |
Once you have gathered 2000 'thingies' you get to further upgrades to your little station, such as hull, hydraulics, electronics, etc. The names matter little: each one does nothing but increases the rate at which you can mine 'wotsits', and by this stage you are craving ever more and more of their yellowy, numerical goodness.
After a short while you discover that this game is going to reward you for interacting with it in various ways. Soon you have devoted your entire evening to clicking the upgrade buttons rewarded each time by the counter of 'thingy-jigs' spinning over faster and faster.
After a while you have become a junky to collecting yellow numbers. You need ever higher orders of magnitude for the next upgrade and so you devote even more of your time to gathering the yellow 'somethings' required by the game. You discover that you can increase the productivity of your station through a number of ways. For example, 'click this button one hundred times and you increase the productivity by 1%'. So you do it. You actually spend the next two or three hours of your life pressing a button hundreds of times to get incrementally faster rates of 'whatchamacallits'.
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| You are an addict now. You will willingly accept the 'advert' button just to get ahead in the game. |
I was wrong.
The developers lied. There is no pay off. No reward.
They promised 'adventure', but there was none. The game has no challenge to it at all. You simply progress through the game by giving it more and more of your time.
Eventually you have gathered an arbitrarily large amount of yellow 'numbers' and the game gives you the option of progressing to the adventure. So you do...
... but first you have to press a button one hundred times....
So you do.
Then the planet explodes. GAME OVER.
You do not even get a chance to continuing playing some more, nor start over. And worst of all, the 'adventure' you were promised from the start does not occur. the game just...stops.
I was left with a feeling of loss for the several hours of my life I had dedicated to clicking buttons on my screen for what turned out to be simply a vehicle for adverts.
This game is click-bait. Literally and figuratively.
It isn't the worst game ever. The graphics have a lovely retro feel and if you really want to waste four or five hours of your life, then there are worse ways, but the developers have been disingenuous in their description. I can't help but feel disappointed and fail to see the funny side of the time wasted.
If you want to play a good 'clicker' - one that rewards you with challenging puzzles and a real sense of the game developing, then do try Candy Box if it still exists. For a great 'digger' game with a rewarding end (and the ability to carry on doing what you want even when the game ends) then check out Motherload on miniclips.
Minus one geek experience point awarded to C6H6. I've never taken geek experience points away before, and I wouldn't do so just for a poor click-baity game, but if you read through the developers comments to poor reviews in the app store, then you will see why these developers need their geek status reducing.
That's all for now. Rant is over, but if you are still will us, then you might want to read about that time I found Usbourne's book of Computer space games from the 80's; or you may be in the mood to waste your time in a fun and rewarding way.