CorePiercer

Nope, this is a pass on basically all levels, I purchased because I thought it might make a good steam deck game, got it on sale for like $1 so figured it was worth at least a dollar. I knew it wasn't "intended" for Steam Deck, so I tried on my PC as well, and this was my experience on both: Missing graphics, some trains are just wheels without any visual on them, menus seem to be missing buttons and no clear indicator the menu is open at times. "NPC"s look gross and when talking to them they are just Anime pictures with similar color schemes. Poor controls, and a huge lack of instructions, took me like 10 minutes just to figure out how to upgrade, and that you can play with just your mouse. Huge lack of polish, the graphics I can get over, I didn't care. But I was getting warned almost every single "dive" on my way up with the message "Does this train ever run out of fuel? Wish I could turn water into fuel!" keep in mind this came in 3 different text boxes you had to click through or it would sit there forever. Oh, and just moving forward will fill your cargo with rocks, so by the time you get to where the good stuff is you have lost like 200 space of cargo. There are like 20 …

Core Piercer is a somewhat unusual game where you control a "mining train" which is a big drilling/mole machine kind of thing. The objective is to drive your train around to fulfill various jobs, with a slightly different twist on the "pixel" miners like Steamworld Dig, in that your train tilts up and down on a free angle rather than moving through pixellated blocks. It's not that the concept here couldn't work, but the technical implementation is laughably bad. Controls and resolution are locked and can't be changed, so there's no way to improve the appalling visuals or the lacking, unsatisfying control scheme. The graphics are particularly bad, a lazy, amateurish blend of pixel "art" and MS-Paint tier scribbling. The laughable cash grab $7 USD price tag on this garbage is clear proof of a cash grab, but there's more, and it's worse. A number of known compromised/paid Steam accounts immediately wrote positive short, 2-3 sentence reviews for it, as direct Steam "purchases", these accounts commonly write reviews all in Russian or in exactly the same broken English. This is a very clear and obvious act of review manipulation from WELOVEBOT CO., LTD.

An unusual idea for the game is to go underground, making your way deeper and farther. With the improvement of the wagon boring machine, there is additional interest. The interface is intuitive.

The game's concept isn't very bad at all, has a very (Super) Motherload kinda feel to it with a mechanic about you being a driller train. It's honestly a mechanic that works well and has a lot of replay-ability in its loop. The problem is the flash quality visual design and obvious bugs in its displays for your various information like fuel and depth and such. To Be Fair, (Super) Motherload started out as a flash game too, but even that had some obvious polish and was a labor of love rather than just "Hey, look what I can do, give money" (also tbf, back then people released games for fun rather than for money so there's that too, but I digress). I bought it on a half priced sale so I'm not torn up about it, but I am sad to see that the game doesn't have the polish it deserves. If Xe2050 doesn't try to copyright this in some way, would love to see another designer/studio pick this up and give it the proper release it deserves. And yes, I might play this again if only for laughs or to study it, not just trash talking it; I really do think there's potential for it, but again am sad that it was made for cash rather than to be played.

Pygame? Looks like a game I will made someday. Good design, but game engine is too basic.

this is like a fever dream. what on earth is going on???