AstroDriller 3020 Review (Windows)

Astrodriller 3020 from Chronic Logic and TapOut Games, doesn’t have great graphics.In fact many of then don’t even scale up well and look bland or jagged when playing in a larger window or full screen. Speaking of in a window, most games will pause or go to a menu when you click outside of them onto the desktop whether on purpose or on accident, but not this one. It just keeps chugging right along without you.

You won’t need 7.1 Dolby Digital surround sound speakers to truly appreciate the sound and the voice work is redundant and stereotypically cliche. In fact, I often turn down the game’s sound altogether and play with Winamp in the background. My apologies to the person who did the music for the game, but after a while, I just wanted to hear whatever I felt like hearing. Apparently, in the future when we’re mining asteroids, everyone will have a Texan accent and say odd things all the time which have no actual bearing on what’s going on or are even tangentially related.

And yet, it’s a decent casual sort of arcade game. An Astrodriller will move back and forth at the top of the screen. As he does so chunks of ore will fall out of the asteroid. Your task is to use laser lines to guide them into the proper vacuum tubes. It’s all color-coded so the driller will turn red, a red chunk will fall and you need to drop it into the red vacuum tube for the most points. The more rocks you put in the proper vacuum tubes the longer your streak is the more points you get. Also, before the rocks get to the vacuum tubes you should try to grind off layers of rock until there are none, that will also score you more points when it lands. You do this by keeping it in contact with the lasers as long as possible. There are also small shining points called schmoints (who knows why) that add points to your asteroid. So you see, it’s all about getting as many points as you can in the alloted amount of time per level.