In
Mr. Driller, you control a little man who’s trying to save the city of Downtown from a torrent of blocks in pastel colors coming from underground. Yeah, the plot makes no sense, but plots have never been strong points of puzzle games. The object of the game is to dig to a certain depth (or, in Survival Mode, to simply last as long as possible). You use your drill to burrow through the blocks. As you destroy blocks, the ones above may come crashing down on you. If they touch blocks of the same color, they glom together. But if four or more glom together, they all disappear and what’s above them starts to fall.
As if that wasn’t enough, you are constantly using up air as you play the game. There are air capsules that you can pick up, and they start off relatively easy to get -- zip in, pick ‘em up, and dodge out before the blocks overhead collapse. But as you dig deeper and deeper, they become more and more insidiously difficult to retrieve. It doesn’t help that the air consumption rate goes up the further down you go. I never realized that the inside of the Earth was airless, but hey, you learn something new every day.
And basically, that’s all there is to the game. You spend a lot of time drilling, dodging blocks, and picking up air capsules. It’s certainly entertaining, and I loved it on the big screen. But there’s something missing from this portable adaptation of the game. I can’t put my finger on it -- the lack of the funky music, the smaller number of gameplay options, the smaller screen all conspired to make what I originally found fun and addicting merely a chore.
