Reach the Core (Flash) review — Free Kongregate Games with Badges

3 badges; 50 points

Reach the Core is a mining game in which you must pilot your drill to a planet’s core in order to refuel your spaceship. Along the way, you can collect mineral to improve the components of your drill and, upon reaching certain milestones, unlock more powerful components. You can also collect “technologies” that grant you a stat multiplier by earning in-game achievements or destroying obstacles with you drill.

If you’ve played this kind of upgrade game before, you know what to expect. Even by the standard of these games, however, Reach the Core is very grind heavy. Each component has several stats to improve, and you often need to nearly max out each stat to reach the milestone unlocking the next part. Add to that four or five unlockable parts in each of the six component types and you’ll be here a while.

The easy badge can be earned in about half an hour. You’ll need around 2 hours total to earn the medium badge and twice that to earn the hard badge. (As a tip, purchase the “Jump” ability as soon as possible. This unlocks a new planet with more resources that will save you a lot of time.) If you’re only interested in the badges, you can let the game run by itself and only click to start each new round.

The soundtrack is fairly good for a flash game. There are spacey ambient touches to the electronic tracks that make theme enjoyable. However, the tracks in the game are few in number and frequently repeated, so they might get on your nerves after a little while.

The story is barebones and entirely superfluous, and from what I can tell, the game doesn’t have a proper ending. Once you unlock the final component you can keep drilling forever, but nothing happens to close out the game. Then again, no one plays upgrade games for the story.

Like a lot of upgrade games, Reach the Core can be fairly addictive. It’s not the type of game you’d want to play in one sitting, but in five minute bursts or as something to keep you hands occupied while watching TV, it can be pretty entertaining.

Take-or-Leave