Well-Worn Puzzles That Will Still Test The Brain Cells
The mole in Mole Cart Mining is letting its species down. It needs a pickaxe, which is like giving a set of knives to a tiger. It uses a minecart to get about underground, and it needs your help to lay tracks to the exit. The mole community is probably eye-rolling at Mole Cart Mining. We’ll give the little dude the benefit of the doubt, and assume it’s tired from all the digging.
The minecart tracks have been jumbled, and it’s down to you to form a continuous path to the exit. That means swapping and rotating each piece to form a sensible path. Certain pieces are locked in place to give you a helping hand: you can’t move the mole or the exit, and there are hexes with gold seams on them that can’t be moved either. That’s hint #1: you will have to ensure that these pieces have tracks moving into and out of them.
You certainly can’t crash the minecart into the walls, and you will need to use every last piece, which are hints #2 and #3. Plus there are places in the grid where there’s only one option (hint #4). You would be wise to complete these spaces first, meandering a track around rocks and single-file paths, so that you know which track pieces you are left with.
We’re Kind Of Digging It
Initially, Mole Cart Mining is simple as rock pie. So many of the hexes have only one solution – a straight track to follow that path, a bendy track to go round a corner – and that all that is left is to connect them together. As long as you grab the gold ore on the way to the exit you’re, um, golden.
But things get difficult. Mole Cart Mining keeps adding new complexities. It starts with crossroad pieces, which encourage you to loop back over your previous paths. Then there are bridges which turn anti-clockwise when your minecart travels over them. More mine carts and exits appear, forcing you to find two independent tracks, rather than just one. Those tracks leapfrog each other thanks to crossroads and bridges, so avoiding a crash becomes paramount.
In the final levels, there are three moles and three exits. The levels open further and further up, giving you fewer hexes that are locked in. You might get three crossroad pieces, which means more loop-the-loops than Thorpe Park. Mole Cart Mining isn’t as easy as it looks.
Less A Hint, More A Spoiler
To help you on the way are some fantastic tools. The Hint system is so helpful that we wonder whether it spoils too much. It draws a red line through the whole arena, so you can see exactly what needs to be placed where. The line even lingers for a while, so you can start socketing a few pieces of track into their correct spaces. We felt guilty using it: it’s that powerful.
The controls are strong – a simple cursor with the A button lifting a piece up and swapping it with another. Press B and the move cancels. It’s always clear what you’re doing, and what will happen when you tap away. It’s a clearly presented game.
The Treasure Is All Mine
The only thing that lets Mole Cart Mining down is that we’ve played it before. These hex-based games are common from Afil Games, and they have a template that works. On occasion, Afil will add in new ideas, but Mole Cart Mining is not one of those times. All of the mechanics – the locked pieces, the rotating bridges, the multiple miners – were present in Hexa Chippy, for example. Which removes a bit of Mole Cart Mining’s glamour. It’s not doing anything that we haven’t played before. If you’ve played these path-making games, and certainly if you’ve played Hexa Chippy, then you might feel short-changed.
So, look at the screenshots. If you’ve played one of these games before, you should be aware that this is more of the same. It’s riding on the tracks of other games. That might be a blessing or a curse.
If you’ve not played something like this before, then Mole Cart Mining is a slightly more glowing recommendation. It achieves the puzzling holy grail: it’s easy to learn and hard to master. You might be daunted at first, but after connecting some exits and gemstones, a pattern begins to form. You can see the looping track that you will have to create if you want to win.
A Solid Underground Puzzler
It’s not effusive praise then, but it’s still praise. Mole Cart Mining is a solid puzzle game that is near-identical to previous games by the publisher. What’s different are the minecart layouts, and those layouts are rather clever. Is it enough to part you with your cash? Only you can make that decision. Check in your minecart to see if you have disposable gold to spend.
Important Links
Going Underground – Mole Cart Mining Is On Xbox, PlayStation and PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/going-underground-mole-cart-mining-is-on-xbox-playstation-and-pc/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/mole-cart-mining-xbox-series/9pc3q0kpbssw
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/mole-cart-mining-xbox-one/9n8npqj612pq
There’s a PC version too – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/mole-cart-mining-windows/9plrdsvxfxd2
