Dig or Die Review

Originally released on Steam back in 2018, Dig or Die is an open world survival crafting game that has just been released on PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Although the game has a “Very Positive” reception on Steam, has developer Gaddy Games’ 2D sandbox title had a successful transition away from keyboard and mouse controls? Let’s dig in, shall we?

The opening text scroll briefly sets the scene: you are a salesperson for the CRAFT & Co. company. Unfortunately, your spaceship has crashed on a hostile planet, and with only a sentient AI voice for companionship (no co-op on consoles, I’m afraid!) your main objective is to build a functioning ship to escape this dangerous world. That’s what the game describes as its main objective, however, and you’ll need to survive long enough to see it through to completion! The “short-term goal” is to survive each night by building a base to withstand an onslaught of aggressive creatures.

You’ll explore and fight with a variety of items and weapons available, but it’s the automated fabricator that you’ve been sent to sell that will be your main tool for survival. This handy little device inhales chunks of the environment and converts them into materials for use in base-building, weapon crafting, and other such useful mechanics. Having a set goal of escape gives Dig or Die a sense of direction in terms of what to do next. You could absolutely ignore the main objective of building a rocket and instead focus on building the biggest, automated, structurally sound base imaginable, or you can try to make do with a hole in the ground and wait it out until morning comes.

Dig or Die has a sort of Flash game look about it, and though it did take me back to times spent on Newgrounds in high school ICT lessons, it does feel a bit bland. The generic menus and UI certainly don’t help, but the environments really fall short in how unique they could have been for a game set on an alien world. It all just looks a bit muddy and washed out, and although a character creator is included, characters and enemies don’t fare much better. It’s a shame because when you compare it to similar titles such as Terraria or Starbound, and their gorgeous pixel-art aesthetics and diverse biomes, Dig or Die falls painfully short of what could have been a really great-looking game.

Playing using a controller constantly reminded me that this was built originally with a keyboard and mouse in mind. It doesn’t control poorly, but some finicky controls when aiming — whether it’s trying to place structures or shoot a monster — cause unnecessary frustration. It just slows the whole thing down, with what would be a simple click of a mouse becoming several button inputs to select an item you need. Which, in the case of needing to equip a weapon while you're being attacked, can quickly result in your death.

So, you’re stranded on an unknown planet; you’ve got some basic survival objects and your fancy space hoover. But what do you actually do in Dig or Die? Well, you dig. Or, you die. Who would’ve guessed! Okay, there is more to it than that (plus, you’ll often dig and die), and despite the simplicity of the game, I found it to be an enjoyable gameplay loop. Starting out with little more than a pea shooter for a weapon and an auto-builder in which you craft newer weapons, structures, items, and so on, you’ll need to mine (well, vacuum, technically) the environment for resources. These resources are then fed into the auto-builder to craft the tools needed to venture further into the world.

The process of gathering materials, building any new gear or structures, and then upgrading the auto-builder (which grants new items to craft), all while keeping an eye on the time of day, is fun, although it does get a bit repetitive after a while. Whilst I found myself sticking close to my home base at first and simply digging downwards, after a few upgrades, new weapons, and armour, I wandered across the top of the planet in search of new materials. This then led to a number of smaller bases I could escape to once the sun went down. Despite building a base being relatively simple, there isn’t all that much to it. A lack of variety in pieces is disappointing, and the simplicity of using just a few types of walls and other structures makes the base building portion of Dig or Die rather lacklustre. What is interesting, however, is that anything you build has a certain amount of weight it can hold. Try to build too far horizontally from a stack of wall pieces and the whole thing will come tumbling down. This is when support structures come into play, and having to actually think about any weak points of my base became a sort of mini-puzzle.

Nighttime is when the base — and any weapons crafted — become your best friends. Any creature type you’ve killed will swarm en masse towards you in an attempt to exact revenge for their fallen friends, and it won’t take them long to take you out if you’re not prepared. Automated turrets are a must for survival, so a steady influx of new ones, as well as higher-level ones, will become the key to living through the harsh night. Of course, this gets much tougher depending on the difficulty selected, as the nights last much longer on the harder modes.

Dig or Die can be a fun, frantic experience when racing against the threat of nightfall to upgrade your defences before bunkering down for the onslaught of creatures out to get you. Though the gameplay loop can be satisfying, I found that there just wasn’t enough variety to keep me from wanting to explore for longer than I needed to in order to escape the planet. Despite the inclusion of different scenarios that start you in different locations, the overall simplicity of Dig or Die just left me wanting more from the game, which ended up leaving me disappointed.