Review: Super Miners
Score:
74%
Version Reviewed: 1.05
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Now this looks pretty good from the screenshots, and I was half expecting a huge run-around platform game with shades of Mario. So, much as I love the Repton/Boulderdash style of gaming, my first thought was that Super Miners was not what I was expecting.
What we have here is the classic 'collect all the diamonds in a mine' game. You’ve got dirt you can dig through, and anything that the dirt was holding up falls down, be it one of those diamonds, or some nasty boulders… which have a habit of rolling away from you when they land on something that’s not perfectly flat. And, truth be told, this is a great game genre, and Super Miners carries it off really well. I guess that in attempting to make the game sound marketable, they forgot that they need to tell you exactly what the game is about. You could argue that the demo version of the game deals with that, but I’m not convinced.
Anyway, as I said, this genre of game is one I really enjoy, so it’s time to get into the one problem with Super Miners on UIQ – and to be fair it’s the same problem that any arcade game has on UIQ. Input. There’s no handy little joystick to move your character around the screen, so you’re left with an area in the touchscreen that acts as your direction keys. You have to tap this to move either Dr Drill or his beautiful daughter Miss Rusty – you can choose which miner you want to play. It’s unwieldy at best, and while it never gets as far as unplayable, it does detract from the game.
You can redefine the hard keys that are around your UIQ machine, but for some reason you can’t use the up or down jog dial (forward and back are fine). This would be a great way to control yourself through the caves, but alas you’re left with tapping the on-screen buttons, which does take you out of 'the zone' when you’re playing (to focus on where your stylus tip is).
And so to the game, which looks lovely and reacts well to the direct taps on the screen. You start with a gentle introduction set of levels, with helpful signs that take you through all the physics of the game. Once you pass these levels, it turns into a right old puzzler, with you having to make choices on which one block is the key to the entire level, and if you should push it left or right. Choose correctly and you get another puzzle to solve, and eventually you finish the level – choose wrong and you’ll need restart the level again, which is going to happen a lot.
Super Miners is a great game, with a lot of thought put behind it and requiring a lot of thought to complete. Unfortunately it is let down slightly by the control system, so while it’s a good game, I would recommend you try the demo first to see if you can live with the control system.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at