Galactic Mining Corp feels like something between one of those addictive web-browser games you'd find back in the day, and a modern mobile game without exploitative microtransactions. But in terms of its rhythm, it's also strangely reminiscent of idle/clicker games.

The meat of the gameplay is vertically-oriented mining expeditions to gather resources for progression, but there's a layer just behind it of smartly allocating those resources for the best ROI. It's very engaging, but occasionally irritating - more than once, I found myself feeling obligated to go back and check my collection to manually level-up any tiles that needed it, because otherwise EXP would be wasted and my overall progress would become less efficient (when what I really wanted to do was just keep mining).

The progression of new acquisitions also feels very idle-clicker-esque, with late-game crewmates being an order of magnitude better than your starting crewmates, and late-game tiles being orders of magnitude stronger than starting tiles, not for any in-lore reason but because that's just how these games are. Likewise, the late-game grind of finishing off those last 30 or so resource tiles took about 10 hours, to the point where I opted to double-task listening to podcasts or Youtube rather than listening to the in-game audio.

Are any of those dealbreakers? Nah. The dropoff in the dopamine rush from blazing-fast progression is a shame, but getting that 100% was still satisfying and I enjoyed my time with this game overall.

Recommended.

[h1]A diamond in the rough, though not a flawless one[/h1] Galactic Mining Corp feels like something between one of those addictive web-browser games you'd find back in the day, and a modern mobile game without exploitative microtransactions. But in terms of its rhythm, it's also strangely reminiscent of idle/clicker games. The meat of the gameplay is vertically-oriented mining expeditions to gather resources for progression, but there's a layer just behind it of smartly allocating those resources for the best ROI. It's very engaging, but occasionally irritating - more than once, I found myself feeling [i]obligated[/i] to go back and check my collection to manually level-up any tiles that needed it, because otherwise EXP would be wasted and my overall progress would become less efficient (when what I really wanted to do was just keep mining). The progression of new acquisitions also feels very idle-clicker-esque, with late-game crewmates being an order of magnitude better than your starting crewmates, and late-game tiles being orders of magnitude stronger than starting tiles, not for any in-lore reason but because that's just how these games are. Likewise, the late-game grind of finishing off those last 30 or so resource tiles took about 10 hours, to the point where I opted to double-task listening to podcasts or Youtube rather than listening to the in-game audio. Are any of those dealbreakers? Nah. The dropoff in the dopamine rush from blazing-fast progression is a shame, but getting that 100% was still satisfying and I enjoyed my time with this game overall. Recommended.