Keep On Mining! is the latest incremental game from EagleEye games, who made the superb Pegidle, which is one of my favourite incrementals ever made. This time around, we are smashing rocks and mining minerals. This game follows a more cookie-cutter (cookie clicker?) setup and is more hands-off as a result.
The game begins with a grid field and some rocks placed on the map. Your pickaxe auto-mines and has an area of effect, and all the player has to do is move the cursor around to place the pickaxe in an optimal place. The game does the rest for you, mining and collecting the resources. The resources collected turn into upgrades on the skill tree. At first, it’ll be improving your range, power, and speed of mining rocks. Then you’ll be increasing the likelihood of new resources appearing on each run, and how much of each material you’ll collect for each completely smashed rock. It is a skill tree that initially focuses on your standard pickaxe, but as you collect wood, ore, and other resources, you’ll be able to unlock upgraded pickaxes that can go even faster and harder.
Nothing changes from the first smash to the last, and this is my biggest issue with Keep On Mining! It is too hands-off for my personal taste. Instead, the game provides additional “attacks” that a pickaxe can cause, such as laser beams, lightning strikes and giant energy orbs. These look pretty and cause more damage across the map, but you’ll still be mindlessly gliding your cursor around mining and collecting resources. I didn’t feel in control of anything; it just happened. By the time the game had ended, I just had some pretty pyrotechnics, but nothing had changed. Early on, you also unlock a mine, which you can upgrade to farm all the resources in the game. In theory, you don’t have to play the game then, although it would take a very long time to win!
Whilst being hands-off is a personal preference, I found it odd that nearly a quarter of the resources you can mine in the game all unlock in the last 30 minutes of the game. They are underutilised and only required for completionists. There is a skill tree lull in the middle of the game where nothing new is happening, adding to the short rinse-and-repeat nature of these games by design. Unfortunately, this all adds up to make Keep On Mining! a miss for me. Others may find it still scratches that incremental itch, but I wasn’t engaged enough to be invested. What I will say is, I was quite unwell when I played the game, and if you are looking for something requiring minimal effort, this fits the bill.
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