Mr. Driller (PS1)
Arcade gaming had changed at the turn of the 21st century. Simple score chasers had lost ground to flashier and more elaborate experiences to try and keep up our outpace the home console market, but despite that climate, over at Namco, an effort was made to revive an old classic. Dig Dug was recognized as a classic of the early arcade but the series had been fairly quiet, the game that was meant to be Dig Dug 3 eventually morphing into a new digging game franchise, Mr. Driller. That ancestry did make it seem a little out of place in the arcade landscape of the time, a simple score chaser sitting beside elaborate machines and 3D fighters, but it captured some of that old charm while having a cleaner cartoon look that avoided it feeling too retro. However, those old sensibilities did limit it somewhat, especially when it came time to port the game to home consoles. A no frills adaptation to consoles like the original PlayStation made it feel a little out of touch with the console market, players expecting more robust or lengthy experiences from games they bought then. The game’s success outside the arcade thus hinged solely on the entertainment value of the core puzzle action play itself.
Mr. Driller takes place in a city named Downtown where strange colorful blocks have begun rising out of the street. To prevent further damage to the city, Mr. Driller is deployed, donning a pink suit and carrying a drill shaped like a jackhammer as he aims to break through the blocks and reach the bottom to uncover the source of this odd calamity. Mr. Driller himself isn’t a complicated character to control, lacking any sort of jump and thus dependent on climbing atop singular block stacks if he ends up down a hole of his own making. His drill is his main tool of getting around, levels starting with him standing atop an even pile of colorful blocks with the player choosing how they want to carve their path down. The colored blocks adhere automatically to any of the same color nearby though, and if you drill through one part of a larger block, it will disappear entirely, potentially disrupting any blocks that were resting atop it. You can drill up, down, or to either side, this crucial for avoiding the inevitable collapses caused by your descent, but there is at least a little grace period before blocks fall. You’ll see them quivering in the air for a few seconds before they begin their descent, and rather helpfully, if they pass any blocks of similar coloration on the way down, they’ll combine with them, forming a safe ceiling instead of crushing your little driller.
Mr. Driller does keep track of your score with breaking blocks of different sizes and setting up different combos allowing you to build up a lot of points. If four blocks of a similar color are placed near each other thanks to your drilling they’ll disappear and potentially set up chains as they cause more falls, but score doesn’t feel like the main objective of the game’s Arcade Mode. Instead, there is a set distance you need to drill down, 2500 feet for Easy mode and 5000 for Hard. A massive block awaits at the end of each stretch of 500 feet, essentially dividing the action into levels, although you won’t actually see too much variation in design between these segments. This is mainly because the game doesn’t get too creative with how it spaces levels. Most of them feel like the colored blocks were scattered with little thought, the Brown X-Blocks often feeling like the only ones placed with much intent. While normal blocks break to a single poke of your drill, Brown X-Blocks require you to prod them five times before they break, Mr. Driller able to set up some barriers to progress by placing these in important spots to slow you down. Besides a nice breather level of a sort where all the blocks are either green or yellow so they all combine and combo with ease, most levels of Mr. Driller present the same challenge of just needing to manage your path and prevent dangerous drops, but later levels crank up the presence of Brown X-Blocks and lean on a particular arrangement perhaps too often, that being blocking the most important element to a successful run: air capsules.
Mr. Driller’s time underground can end thanks to him getting squashed by what he carelessly digs through, but your air supply is a timer of sorts that is incredibly important to manage. Little air capsules can be found periodically as you dig, and while you can initially skip one or two and still have a decent supply to keep digging, later on capsules become more precious and the Brown X-Blocks start to be placed to block your access to them. In fact, once you reach a certain point, every air capsule is surrounded by a fairly similar brown block barrier, the player needing to dig out nearby blocks to cause them to fall out of the way to gain access, set up matches, or just give you room to do that more involved drilling. However, breaking a Brown X-Block makes you lose about as much oxygen as you’ll gain from grabbing the capsule, and with lower levels of your dig keeping you near asphyxiation quite often, you often have to identify how to move the brown blocks in a short amount of time. This adds some important tension to the experience since digging can be a bit breezy and simple initially, identifying safe spots not to get crushed not too difficult, but leaning so heavily on similar arrangements of the same hard to break squares makes the back half of the game feel rather samey and they aren’t arranged so differently that you feel like you need to concoct fresh tactics each time you encounter one. Lives do at least let you fail some on the way and reviving after a death gives you full oxygen, but to see the true ending at 5000 feet below will likely require a good bit of practice in the 2500 mode before you’re ready for the more demanding long term dig.
A successful run of Mr. Driller’s arcade mode isn’t going to be a very long experience, some training runs and attempts likely to add more to the game’s longevity, but the simple fun of carving your own path and trying to stay safe isn’t exactly going to draw you back often or make it feel like the main adventure is worth plunging back into once you’ve conquered it. Mr. Driller on PS1 at least offers a few extra modes, although they are very basic alterations to the formula and not very creative. Survival Mode is just about seeing how far you get and how many points you can earn on one life, but Time Attack is at least a little different in format. Time Attack has 10 courses to tackle within a set time limit, the player needing to drill deep enough without running out of time. Clocks can be picked up on the way to add to your timer, but despite separating the stages, Mr. Driller still feels like it can’t come up with particularly imaginative ways to arrange its blocks, making most of them feel pretty similar. More liberal use of brown blocks in Time Attack do make some stages with a bit of a visual identity, but you’re also basically just following a pre-defined path, the maze not too engaging since it isn’t flexible and more about making sure you don’t drill into a dead end and have to restart to try again. Level design flexibility isn’t likely helped by the fact many important blocks will inherently be off-screen either high above or down below, but there’s still some thought involved in managing the nearby squares so off-screen surprises rarely catch you unaware. It feels like Mr. Driller can’t get too elaborate because it can’t often account for your fast drilling with levels that would require more thought to navigate unless it literally blocks your path to slow you down some.
THE VERDICT: Zipping down through the ground with your quick drilling work has a simple fun to it, Mr. Driller able to challenge that task somewhat with the falling colored blocks and your need to swiftly assure your safety by spotting matches. Brown X-Blocks do become a bit overplayed as you dig deeper though, blocking the important air capsules in unimaginative ways, although they are used to a bit better effect in Time Attack as the rare way Mr. Driller can shape its levels into something more distinct. The main gameplay still feels rather simple no matter the mode or how deep you’re in, the player always hunting air capsules without much motivation to vary up their approach, but it does have its moments and some colorful charm even if the game doesn’t provide much to do besides drilling down in another attempt at the same old same old.
And so, I give Mr. Driller for PlayStation…
An OKAY rating. The simple drilling, managing the shaking blocks overhead, and having your path guided by the air capsule placement does give Mr. Driller an easily understood central gameplay direction that made it work well enough in arcades. You could pop in some quarters and play it for a bit before moving onto some other machine, it mirroring older classics in that way, but it also doesn’t have the degree of variation or evolution to make it a game you’d constantly return to or commit to long-term, making its PS1 release a bit hard to justify getting. When the standout level of the experience is one where you barely have to play because all the blocks break so easily, it’s a bit of a shame to try and push to 5000 feet below because most of what you’re seeing is another cluster of Brown X-Blocks hiding an air capsule again. You still have to be a bit smart in movement to avoid being squashed while also making it so you can slip through and get the capsules, but it’s not a task with as exciting variation as something like the game that inspired it, Dig Dug. Dig Dug’s enemies could move to different areas and you had to adjust your planning a lot more to keep up, your tunnel shaping having more meaning than it does in Mr. Driller. Here you can often enough divert your course to the side a bit to make falling blocks a non-factor, although Time Attack did show there was maybe a way to better guide the player. While the hard blockages aren’t always used to the best effect there because you often had to rigidly follow the prescribed paths they make, having more moments where you could get trapped for sloppy rushed digging could make you more patient and thoughtful in how you play. The air meter is a bit too quick to deplete though, so a few variables would require tinkering if layers were made more complex, but at present, Mr. Driller is mostly leaning on simple digging fun with a bit of thinking when you need your air capsules, and that isn’t quite enough to earn it a ringing endorsement for home play.
Mr. Driller does enough that it didn’t flounder despite when it hit the arcades, it still identifying the simple joy in clearing away a busy screen and making your own paths through a game space. Focusing a bit more on trying to drill to the bottom instead of caring overly much about your score was a decent adaptation to the shifts in what players wanted out of their games at the time, but it still feels like Mr. Driller kept too much of its mind in the past when it should have tried to find a balance between the easily understood and accessible gameplay style and the potential for growth and variation that came with releasing almost two decades after its inspiration Dig Dug.