Mr.Mine | a Review
originally published on 14/10/2023;
Hello everyone, I am the mineshaft escapee, G.E.M.Simov, a goon with an impressive capability for digging, and I'm here to tell you about "Mr.Mine".
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
In addition to that, this is an IDLE game. Those are barely proper games and so I will put in less effort with reviewing them than I would otherwise.
Gameplay
Straight off the bat - this game has some obtusely long load times. It starts off and the Player needs to wait for it to boot up over the course of at least a minute - and there seems to be no good reason for that. It just takes a while to get going, which is beyond odd.
Then, one might immediately notice that they’re in the deep. The Player is just thrown into the wild, with barely any indication of what to do, aside from some arrows pointing at certain things (more on that in the Presentation section), and already mechanics are working.
First, this game does not feature a Player Character. It does feature a massive, humongous mine that keeps growing bigger and bigger. It does so by itself - as soon as the game starts, a Drill starts drilling down, expanding the mine every so often. The expansion occurs in layers - each layer being a kilometer in depth, whilst also providing a new Mineshaft for the Player to make use of - 1 per Kilometer of depth that has been reached.
In those Mineshafts, every so often, will appear deposits - be they Coal deposits, ore veins or other, more valuable things - and the Player can click them a certain number of times, receiving a certain number of units of that resource per click. In the case of Coal, the Player receives Coal per click, with the amount of Coal received being equivalent to the current depth of the Mine - 1 unit per Kilometer of depth.
Well, that seems to be the case, but actually it is not. That is only the case until the Player reaches Mine depth of 10 Kilometers, at which point the increase in yields disappears, and every click is worth 1 unit of the resource being clicked. Immediately, that’s not a good design-choice, because, initially, the Player assumes that this will be the norm, that this is how the game will work and that this is a mechanic. However, then the mechanic is removed and the game does not introduce a reasoning for that removal, nor does it explain why that was happening in the first place.
It creates an expectation within the Player and then defies that expectation in the worst possible way, by misleading the Player and taking away a fun mechanic from them. Already, a bad call… But it gets even more obtuse, because the increase returns - only it no longer makes sense. Again, this might be a Presentation issue, but it is also one that affects Gameplay, so it is problematic - the Player does not know what is going on more than half of the time, nor do they know why things are happening.
The rate at which deposits appear in the Mineshafts is quite low, but with increasing the number of Mineshafts in which deposits can appear, this issue appears to be alleviated, yet that’s not the case. Ultimately, clicking deposits is not the main way of gaining resources. With that said, almost all of the Gameplay that is available has been gone over. The Player can either use the scroll button on their mouse to navigate the plethora of Mineshafts, going up and down, or click a pair of arrows on the left side of the game window.
So, the Player clicks deposits, collects resources and scrolls up and down. That’s that, but what does the Player do with those resources? Well, they can either be sold or used to craft things, or maybe even traded in exchange for specific goods. Each resource is its separate entity, has a separate price, is used in different crafting recipes and trade deals.
Money is earned by selling resources, and is then used in some crafting recipes or to hire miners. Miners automate the process and generate resources constantly, with every Mineshaft having a number of miners equal to the number of miners hired. Miners are the main source of resources, and the main source of money, far outpacing what can be done by clicking deposits - if only because of the fact that deposits appear so sporadically and rarely.
What do upgrades do, then? They increase the maximum quantity of resources that can be held at a time, they increase the speed at which the Drill digs, they unlock new mechanics and make progress a bit faster. There is, however, something that makes progress way faster - tickets!
The premium currency in this idle game are tickets. They allow the Player to purchase chests, which chests contain pretty much everything. They provide massive bonuses, unlock new mechanics and are, as one would expect, incredibly valuable and break the pace of the game tremendously.
Not that the game has a good pace to its gameplay loop, as it is tedious almost from the get-go, but still - the integrity of the game is greatly damaged by that. Not only greatly, in fact - but some mechanics exclusively rely on the Player having, and using, large amounts of chests.
An example of that are Super Miners and Scientists, who are both obtained via chests, and the mechanics surrounding them want the Player to get more chests. In the case of Super Miners, they start off at level 1 and can be improved, but only by scrapping other Super Miners or obtaining a special Currency from a specific type of chest. The incentive to improve their levels is there, because they provide insane boosts to productivity and resource generation.
In the case of Scientists, the best way to use them is to send them out on dangerous missions - as they can be sent on safe and dangerous missions, and the dangerous missions bear with them FAR greater rewards, but also a far greater risk. The scientists can die, and then they either get buried and can no longer be used, this requiring replacement via chest opening and luck, or can be resurrected via the premium Currency.
Both of those mechanics want the Player to spend money and buy the Currency. They are almost necessary for the Player's progression, otherwise one is going to really suffer through sitting and waiting.
At least, that is the assumption. In truth, the Player will suffer through sitting and waiting regardless of whether or not they buy the currency and then buy chests. The insane amount of time this game wants from the Player is so vast that even with an infinite amount of real money, it is still going to take at least a week of real time (time spent in game) to finish.
That is, in part, due to the fact that the chest purchasing interface is wonky, at best. There is no option to purchase a number of chests at once, one can only buy a single chest at a time. Then there’s the fact that the game is, essentially, separated into three different “games” - there’s Earth, which is the first experience the Player will encounter. Then there's the Moon, which is the second experience to be had - 1000 more levels, with new ores and upgrades, requiring intense amounts of time to go through. Lastly, there’s Titan, which is even more absurd than the Moon, and it takes even longer than that.
As usual, the idle game wants the Player to pay or wait tens of hours for a single upgrade. That's beyond wrong, when it comes to game design, and no amount of interesting upgrades or neat expansions to the mine are going to fix this, nor is going to a different planet or finding unspeakable horrors going to alleviate the tedium. Overall? 1/3
Presentation
As previously stated, this game has some massive issues with the way it presents itself to the Player. However, let me start off with the good things - it looks neat, perhaps because it is reminiscent of the era of flash games. That’s because it used to be a flash game.
There are not many things to look at in the game, but what is on display has the exact amount of polish to it to resemble an overly detailed drawing of some buildings or of a mine that someone, who was very bored and had only one piece of paper, would draw in class. It’s got that air of wonder that was given off by games made by kids or teens with an idea, rather than by desperate developers who are being taught how to implement micro-transactions into their games when they go to University for game development.
Either way, that’s also coupled with a neat, if slightly repetitive, bit of music that combines well with the atmosphere of a mine.
Now, onto the issues at hand - this game does not inform the Player of almost anything. There is no Tutorial, there is no indication of how many Watts are being used by the Drill, there is no indication of why or how, a vast amount of information is left beyond the Player’s reach.
That’s a failure of the game’s Presentation which affects Gameplay, but one could argue that the lack of information also obscures the fact that the Player can buy things, which is a great bonus - not seeing constant advertisements urging the Player to buy things is great.
One last thing - this game asks the Player to fill out surveys. That’s incredibly odd. 2/3
Story
This idle game, unlike most idle games, has something akin to a story. Now, I say akin, because it is presented through random blurbs of text offered up by miners, and by blurbs of text the miners present when they are clicked. Some of the “story” is locked behind random chance showing the text boxes that provide the Player with the “lore”.
Overall, however, it’s barely a story. More fitting is the word lore - there are some interesting facts about the Miners or the other Characters that are present, which can be gathered up and slotted together to build up a world. Evidently, there is a woman that had decilliontuplets, or something along those lines, and all those children wound up to become miners.
But that's as far as it goes. There are a few bits of potential emergent storytelling, there are crumbs that appear and present the Player with enough nudges to make them think and ponder, but it is even more cryptic and insufficient than Dark Souls' item descriptions. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this idle game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time?
No, even if I found it enchanting, due to its origins as a flash game, and how well kept the flash game feeling has remained. 0/1
Conclusion
4/10. As any idle game, this is not one I'd recommend to anyone not a fan of idle games. For fans of those, I'd say it might be a decent sample, if only because of just how odd some aspects of it are, or because of the concept.
In the bag of mediocrity, to gather some dust. Fortunately, the abandoned mineshafts could become a funky dungeon for some adventurers to explore!