It’s something I rarely find myself doing in the real world, but in video games I’m always digging for something. There’s always somewhere that needs mining for materials, and usually doing so will give you a stronger sword to use or help you create a new feeding trough for your livestock. Digging itself can just be satisfying too, just ask my man Mr Driller. The mining fantasy continues now with Into the Slimy Mines, which combines Roguelike randomness, pack opening, and most importantly burly Scottish dwarf drill operators.
In Into the Slimy Mines you work for the mining megacorp Ironkilt Intergalactic Industries, who like all megacorps aren’t exactly the best employers. When an accident causes your entire crew to get lost on a moon inhabited exclusively by slimes, it’s up to you to rescue them before the bigwigs realise the problem and find new miners. It’s a fairly silly story (like all stories with a slime theme) but it ensures plenty of gruff voice lines as you play, which is all that really matters.
The goal of each stage of Into the Slimy Mines is to make your way to an escape pod buried deep in the ground, and rescue the dwarf trapped inside. You do this by placing dig cards, which are essentially different shaped blocks that can be pieced together to make a path. When you do this though you open up new holes for the slimes to enter, and they’re happy to blob about and devour anything that stands in their way.
The way you deal with slimes is with turrets of course, which essentially means this is a tower defence game. There are all sorts of different stationary guns you can add to your mine, from simple machine guns and shotguns to long range rocket launchers. With so many different places the slimes could potentially approach from you’ll need to plan ahead with turrets if you want to succeed, because gold isn’t limitless.
At the start of each dig you get given a starter pack of cards to open, full of turrets, dig cards and drills. You can play drills on the gold veins you find to gain more money between waves, but they’re also another thing to defend. With the money you earn you can buy more cards in the shop, either as single cards or booster packs of various types. The booster packs provide much more value, but sometimes you’ll get disappointing turrets that don’t suit our setup. This didn’t stop me buying them at every opportunity though.
There’s more depth in Into the Slimy Mines than the basic level too. All your various constructed turrets and drills can be upgraded by placing another of the same rank on top of it, which saves space but costs extra power. You have to manage power by building generators, which can also be upgraded accordingly. There’s a lot to manage on each run, so be careful so you succeed and unlock some extra stuff.
Unlike a traditional Roguelike, Into the Slimy Mines is split into different stages. Each of these brings new elements like enemies, tiles that cause havoc, or just adds extra distance to the dwarf in peril. There are even optional objectives on each stage which will help you unlock later stages and other goodies, like new miners (which have different starting cards and abilities), turrets and various other cards.
Into the Slimy Mines is a very unique and entertaining Roguelike, but stages often feel a little samey, without a huge amount of random elements that change and a lot of the same turrets. The bosses can be a bit frustrating too, because you don’t find out what you’ll be facing until you reach the miner in need of assistance. This is often fine, but sometimes a boss will specifically dig in a straight line towards your base. Without preparing for this it can just feel a little unfair, and lead to a mad rush of buying turrets that lacks that strategic element.
I had a great time playing Into the Slimy Mines, and a lot of that is because there’s nothing else quite like it. There are hours of content to dig into here (pun intended) and runs are just bitesize enough to fit perfectly into any day. Whether you’re a fan of tower defence, Roguelikes or even strategy games, you likely find something to enjoy in this delightfully dwarven package.
