Game review: I Dig It - iPhone / iPod Touch

No, before you think it, the reference to gem doesn’t mean this is a gem matching game a la Bejeweled. Instead, this is a rather strange game involving a farmer, an unpaid mortgage and a lot of excavation.

Farmer Lewis has got behind with his payments and needs to raise $100,000 fast. Conventional farming of his land is not lucrative enough so he decides to go below land instead – down, deep deep down.

Using his rather impressive digger fashioned from an old bulldozer, he decides to hunt for treasure beneath his farm.

By unearthing and then selling some of the 60 different types of valuable items he finds, such as coins, trinkets, crystals and fossils, he’s able to make his repayments and save his farm. At least that’s the idea.

Using the on-screen control stick you need to dig through the surface and burrow underground in search of these minerals and other things. When you’re loaded up you then use your digger’s rocket boosters (yes, rocket boosters) to shoot back up through the tunnels you’ve made and back to the surface where you can turn your discoveries into cash.

This might all sound very easy – you dig down, you find treasure, you go back up again.

But I Dig It is nowhere near as simple as it sounds. This is a game with a seriously deep level of strategy.

For one thing, your digger uses fuel to dig underground and you need to watch it doesn’t fall to empty.

Also, your digger can only sustain a certain amount of damage as it searches for valuables.

And it can only carry a finite amount of cargo before you must return to the surface.

Another consideration is the temperature of your digger’s engine. You mustn’t let it overheat through doing too much work.

Efficient, carefully planned digging is the only way to stop one or more of these things becoming a problem.

The more valuable items are further down but there is greater risk to your digger the further down you go and the longer you spend underground. Get too greedy on each dig and you won’t make it out safely.

If for whatever reason your digger breaks then it’s game over and you must begin again. It’s success or failure in this game, there is no cosy middle ground.

The fear of seeing the dreaded ‘game over’ message at any given moment gives this game an unforgiving edge and it can be frustrating to start over after making some decent progress. An option to purchase an extra life later in the game has been added in a recent update but it’s still essentially one mistake and you’re done. I’d rather see some other sort of penalty for running out of fuel, overheating or damaging the digger – maybe losing all your money or having your digger stripped of all its upgrades would be kinder than game over.

Speaking of money and upgrades - when you return to the surface you can use cash to refuel your digger, carry out repairs or buy various upgrades for your machine.

The strategy here is to buy the right upgrades at the right times, but you obviously need to make sure your balance is going up all the time if you’re going to hit the financial target before the four-hour deadline.

There are six things you can upgrade, each increasing in cost the more you upgrade it. The upgrades include bigger cargo bays and fuel tanks, a faster drill and a stronger hull.

I Dig It has a really nice rustic art style which gives it a distinctive look.

The controls are very basic but this is a god thing. The digging stick (which I believe is the correct technical term for it) is all you need to worry about, which leaves you free to get on with digging up that underground loot.

There are more nice touches, such as a scorecard which logs stats such as earnings, how many ‘diggins’ collected, deepest tunnel dug and so on.

As well as the main campaign mode of trying to save Farmer Lewis’s homestead, I Dig It also has an open-ended free play mode and five mini-game challenge modes, giving the game extended longevity.

Some people might dismiss I Dig It as being just a shallow side-view digging game. But anyone who does that is missing out on what is a rock-solid title.

The clever mix of strategy, resource management and upgrade system make this a really interesting and enjoyable experience, a little different from anything else I’ve seen before.

Verdict: 8 out of 10 – All the fun of underground treasure hunting, with a healthy dose of skill and strategy