Thank you Chronic Logic for giving us this game to review.

AstroDriller 3020 takes place in the year 3020 and there’s lots of money to be made in collecting gems from outer space. The drillers drill out chunks of coloured rocks and your job is to use laser beams to grind them down while guiding them to the vacuum tube of the same colour. The rocks are worth more or less depending on how much you grind them.

To progress to the next level you have to accumulate a certain number of points. The number of points you get will determine your ranking for that level. Available rankings are, from highest to lowest: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. Depending on your rank, you may also earn upgrade points. Additionally, if you didn\'t get a very high rank on a level, you can go back and replay it to improve your score without any penalties.

The number of points you get will determine your ranking for that level. Available rankings are, from highest to lowest: platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Depending on your rank, you may also earn upgrade points. Additionally, if you didn\'t get a very high rank on a level, you can go back and replay it to improve your score without any penalties.

You can spend your upgrade points at the store to give yourself advantages such as increased critical points, faster grinding rates, longer laser duration, more and longer laser beams and so on. The upgrade costs vary and you can only upgrade things a certain number of times. With upgraded gear you can replay earlier levels to get a much better score.

The level difficulty increases at a reasonable rate. At first you only have to worry about sorting out one color. Later you’ll have multiple colors and multiple astronauts grinding and chucking asteroids your way. To make matters worse, later in the game the vacuum tubes will no longer be stationary and will be at different angles.

Fortunately, the astronauts turn the color of the stone they are grinding, thus giving you a heads up to what’s coming your way. There are asteroids and little stars floating through your area of space, and if you angle your rocks to collide with them you get more points.

There’s a lot of strategy involved in this game. Not only is it difficult to track and sort the different asteroids, but you have to guide them without blocking or losing all the other asteroids floating around. Many levels go beyond just putting the rocks into the vacuum tube. For instance, in order to pass some levels you have to hit certain stars for extra points.

The sound effects are nice and spacey and the background music is very pleasant. The astronauts will praise you when you do well and taunt you when you mess up. They don\'t curse at you but they will tell you that you suck. Of note: when I installed this game on my laptop I didn’t have sound at all. The technical support was very good and they suggested I download the latest OpenAL drivers, which solved my problem.

Graphically this game won’t blow you away, but it has some eye candy and it\'ll run well even on weak computers like netbooks. The lasers are pink and shiny and when you grind away all the stone, the gems look pretty too. The particle effects look good and the physics work really well with this game. The interface is pretty straight forward and easy to use.

For $10 this is a good buy for fans of puzzle games, even though it is rather short. Once you beat all ninety levels, you can go back and improve upon your score and max out your upgrades. However, if you are not a perfectionist, plan on being entertained for only a few hours.  There is a free demo and this game is available on PC and Mac systems. Other than the taunts, this is a clean game that both kids and adults can enjoy.