Deep Town is a pretty interesting little idle game where you dig, create items with the resources you find, fight some underground enemies and collect upgrades to create new stuff to keep the whole process going. I found many systems and core tenants of the game to be fun and engaging, but sadly the whole affair is packaged in a free-to-play model that means it sacrifices much of what could make it great in order to sell you premium resources, turning it into a disappointing wait-fest.
The core gameplay of Deep Town is simple enough; you have an array of four abilities and use them to dig through layers upon layers of rocks. Some abilities just deal damage to the rocks and must be manually cast, others are active for a while while some have other effects like making the rocks easier to destroy for a few seconds. After every few levels, you get to a boss fight which requires you to deal damage quickly enough - the bosses regenerate their health - so you are gated there if you can’t damage them faster. You upgrade your abilities via the different resources you collect.
Each level has its own resource production and you’ll need to build mining stations to get them. You can also decide to build archaeological camps and chemical plants, among other things, and you can move your buildings around underground if you prefer resources from certain levels over other ones. These buildings take progressively longer to build, up until the point that you have to wait days until your next creation is completed. This feels extremely painful and makes the whole game feel like a cheap lost cause when you have to stop because the next thing is hours away. You need to manually collect all resources produced, but you also can use drones to automate certain tasks, like gathering stuff, building items from the collected resources, and more. Which is neat in theory - you choose how you you want to allocate your resources - but since the drones are also used to build the multi-hour structures, you end up feeling more limited than engaged.
It’s a bit of a shame, really, the game could’ve been great if everything just came together really fast instead of taking so much time. The concept of digging to get stuff that you use to build stuff to discover new technologies and game systems is really interesting. Even with all the quests giving you a pittance of premium currency, I barely could get anywhere and I sure wasn’t going to play this for many more days, minutes at a time. A real shame!
