Galactic Mining Corp, at first, reminded me of old “mining” classics such as Motherlode where you would venture into dangerous mines with your ship, collect minerals, avoid dangers, then sell everything in order to upgrade your mining machine in various ways, like taking less damage, drilling faster, etc. in order to rince and repeat. Galactic Mining Corp isn’t exactly that refined, instead betting on width instead of depth - a ton of things to collect, unlock and planets to grind, but ultimately making the game less engaging because of the lack of focus required in order to play it.
The core loop of GMC is simple enough; you start at your base, build some buildings to get very small upgrades to various stats, like health, resistances to various elements, money gained, light radius, and so forth, then you explore the galaxy, pick up a planet, then drill until you get to the core, which nets you some skill points. Doing so, you find resources (the various blocks you drill) and items in chests, you recruit crew members, unlock rooms for your HQ, research your materials, and explore more of the galaxy to find other planets with different resources to drill.
This loop is fun in theory, but in practice you have so many things that you do that only have minimal impact, minuscule incremental upgrades that really don’t seem to matter and thus do not feel meaningful. Perhaps once you’ve doubled your Drill Power, for instance, you do drill blocks faster, or ten points of fire resistance will make a big difference in the fire planet you’ve been exploring, but while you’re accumulating these points slowly, they don’t seem to make a difference, and worse yet, you’ll be going to more difficult fire planets where blocks have more health and you take more damage anyways, so at best you’ll be offsetting the difficulty curve.
And if you’re staying in easier maps to ‘grind’ for materials and items that you need to complete this or that quest, the gameplay is basically just waving your mouse around, boosting willy-nilly until you run out of health or reach the core, because you lose nothing if your drill explodes, you just don’t think about what you’re doing, there’s no strategy, no balance of picking up health refills at the right timing, you just go in, drill randomly, explode and do it again.
Which can be fine for sure! But it wasn’t really what I wanted out of that kind of game. There are some good ideas here, I love the number of progression systems, elemental planets, and the visual style is pretty neat, but it was too simple for me.
