Dig, Place, Defend… and Try Not to Get Annoyed
Working for Ironkilt Intergalactic Industries does not seem like the greatest gig in the universe. After crash landing on a slime-infested moon, losing your dwarven crew, and being told to rescue them before the boss decides to replace you, Into the Slimy Mines throws you into a roguelike tower defence game where digging is just as important as defending.
Developed by Ant Workshop and published by Wales Interactive, Into the Slimy Mines takes the familiar tower defence formula and tries to give it a card-based twist. You dig tunnels using randomised cards, you place defences using randomised cards, you use consumables that are randomised cards… you get it. Dwarven tower defence with a Slay the Spire type card system that seems to be becoming increasingly popular in recent titles.
Ant Workshop have a strong idea. A tower defence game where the map is a square of land and you create the real map yourself in real-time. Combined with a booster pack system and some grumpy, pixelated dwarves, this should work. So let me tell you where I believe the developers dropped the ball… or should I say pickaxe.
Pixel Art With Plenty of Gold
Visually, Into the Slimy Mines is charming. It goes for a pixel aesthetic that fits the setting of dwarven mines nicely. Sprites are well-designed for the turrets, generators, drills and all the other equipment you’d expect a technologically advanced dwarf to take down into the mines. Better yet, upgraded versions of those items do a good job actually looking upgraded. That may seem like a small thing, but when shinier items are your main focus of each run, it is abundantly important for your game to make players excited and wanting to save up for the next piece of kit.
The effects and animations are nicely polished too, with plenty of satisfying little flashes, clinks, and hit-sounds to go with the action. Anything involving gold is especially good. Collecting it, drilling into it, spending it, watching it burst out of the ground after every round – all of it gives that perfect hit of dopamine every tower defence player needs. And I would have been more than worried if that weren’t the case. For a game where you play as a dwarven miner, if the gold does not feel good to mine, something has gone horribly wrong. Thankfully, that is not the case here. Although… there is plenty enough going wrong that I will get into.
Like the slimes themselves being a little less exciting than the other designs. Enemy variety could either feel endearing or a bit lazy depending on how much you enjoy watching blue blobs bob about your tunnels. Personally, I lean more towards the latter. There are variations, sure, but with the enemies mostly consisting of slimes or slime-adjacent creatures, they never feel at all creative or interesting to fight. For a game with such fun item sprites and a decent amount of personality elsewhere, the enemies feel like a bit of a copout.
Dwarves, Jokes and Text Boxes
The narrative is mostly played as a joke, which is perfectly serviceable in the tower defence genre. I wasn’t expecting an emotional epic and there isn’t one here, so steer clear if you are looking for the story. The dwarves do have a nice bit of character to them, with much appreciated voice acting. The stereotypically dwarven voice also helped a lot of jokes land where they wouldn’t have if they had just been written in a text box.
That said, the game does have a habit of presenting massive boxes of text to say very little from very early on. These are not voice acted either, which makes them feel even heavier. Luckily, they are skippable, without losing too much of what is going on. It is mostly dwarves being dwarves, bosses being bosses, and everyone having a generally bad time on a moon full of salty slimes.
Packs to Match the TCG Craze
The thing that separates Into the Slimy Mines from other games in the genre is the card system. Cards represent everything in your inventory and everything in the store, whether that be turrets, explosives, displacers, generators or digging. Purchased from the store or found in packs, these cards can be placed before the slimes come or, with active items like dynamite, used on the slimes as they storm the tunnels. Matching cards can also be combined to upgrade equipment, just like in every mobile game advert you see nowadays.
The card packs are good fun, as loot boxes are in any game, depending on your morals. But morals have very little play here as there are no microtransactions, thank God. It is all a part of the run. The gambling aspect of packs and rerolls in the shop also fit nicely with the dwarven aesthetic. Dwarves risking everything to get their tiny hands on shinier things? Sounds about right.
Digging Yourself Into a Hole
The issue is that the digging system, despite having a lot of potential, ends up being unnecessarily tedious. On paper, being able to create the battlefield yourself is brilliant. No other tower defence game I have played has offered that feeling of carving out the route mid-run, shaping the map as you go. I get the vision, I really do. But in practice, the system feels far too restrictive and far too particular. Why does every dig have to connect to a gate? Why not let me get creative with my defences and my routes instead of shoehorning me into similar designs every time?
Also, one misplaced tunnel can ruin a forty minute run in a single button press, which means I’m usually making a single button press, back to the home page. This is especially frustrating early on, before you unlock more digging power or fully understand how the game wants to be played. You can easily find yourself softlocked within the first few missions while still trying to feel out the systems and experiment. With runs stretching on, as they often do with tower defence games, you can imagine how demoralising that can be. A lot of misplaced digs lead to resets or defeat, and that is far too easily achieved with the clunky design of the dig cards being set at specific shapes designed to be difficult to use. Ant Workshop should have trusted their environmental hazards like fossilised bones and boss spawners to be enough for the player to work around, without making the digging system so unintuitive.
Almost always creating your defences feels less like carefully building up a clever setup and more like putting the square block in the square hole. If there is gold, place a drill on it. If there is a gate spawning slimes, place any one of your gadgets in one of the three slots that face it. It sounds harsh, but compared to competition like Bloons TD 5 or 6, where you have much more freedom to place towers wherever you please, Into the Slimy Mines can feel insanely limiting. Instead of victory feeling like the result of your own genius, it can feel like the shop decided to be nice this time and you simply placed your cards where any other sentient creature would.
I can see a world where the digging system is someone’s idea of player expression, min-maxing gate placements and planning routes. But I don’t think that’s the case for most players. The way you place defences makes Into the Slimy Mines feel like a turn-your-brain-off mobile game, but the digging then requires precise planning, placement and strategy, leaving both types of players unsatisfied. Additionally, increasing the attention and skill you have to give to the placement of digs also increases the difficulty; meaning difficulty ramps up much faster than any Bloons title, with players able to lose quite easily in missions as early as the tutorial. Difficulty is not necessarily a negative for someone who likes a challenge, but I’m someone who likes a challenge and still the challenge here only meant further frustration as I wrestled with the game mechanics more than the slimes.
Controller? Good Luck Down There
On an Xbox controller, the controls can feel clunky. Placing and shuffling through cards takes too many flicks or clicks of the stick or the d-pad, with some inputs often not registering or not quite what you wanted. For example, it is not always clear whether moving down on the stick is selecting your inventory, whether moving sideways is, or whether Into the Slimy Mines is yet to decide.
Cards that cannot currently be activated and are greyed out still take up a slot that you have to click past, even without indicating that when you hover over them. This means you can end up flicking mindlessly through cards without any information until the one you want finally highlights itself. The developers do try to remedy this by having identical cards stack on top of one another, which helps a little, but not enough. And the phenomenon of having two of the same cards in your inventory at once without instantly placing, doesn’t happen often enough for it to make any difference.
The menus are also tedious to navigate, though not quite as bad as when you are actually in a run. After a couple of trial and error sessions between runs, you will get the hang of it, but that does not mean it ever feels natural.
All that to say, Into the Slimy Mines really feels like it was designed for keyboard and mouse first, and controller second.
No Bugs, Just Slime
With all that negativity, a compliment I can give is that I didn’t experience any bugs, glitches, or annoying (unintentional) issues during my time with Into the Slimy Mines. Outside of the menus being a bit of a pain to navigate on controller, the game runs cleanly and does what it sets out to do. That might sound like faint praise, but for a roguelike built around cards, upgrades, tunnels, waves and a lot of moving parts, it is worth mentioning.
It’s polished, but that doesn’t mean it’s always smooth.
A Strong Idea Lost to the Mines
Into the Slimy Mines is a game full of strong ideas that, like the player, don’t have enough room to breathe. The card-based systems are fun, the aesthetic is charming, the effects are satisfying, and there is a decent amount of dwarven personality buried away in those slimy tunnels. But the digging system holds it back. It should be the thing that makes Into the Slimy Mines stand out, and it does, but not in the way intended. It makes the whole experience far more restrictive and tedious than it ever needed to be. Add in clunky controller navigation, uninspired enemy designs, and a few too many resets, and the game can feel like it’s trying to frustrate you rather than help you have fun.
At its best, Into the Slimy Mines could be a difficult niche for hardcore players that have already played the greats of the tower defence genre and are looking for something different. But even if that was me, I’m not sure if I’d be giving this one a second chance.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/into-the-slimy-mines/9nb75n9f10qg
