Thank you Short N Sweet for sending us a review code!

Welcome to UDO (Unidentified Drilling Object) Corp! You’ve been hired as their newest driller. Your goal is to excavate deep tunnels and eliminate enemies as you mine for gold. Your powerful drill will make quick work of dirt and most enemies but some of the creatures have tough exoskeletons that will require power drill or side attacks to take them out. The side maneuvers will consume fuel so you’ll have to gather up battery refills often. Health replenishments are often worth picking up as there are many environmental hazards like spikes, acid, and explosions to contend with.

Upon starting the UDO, you’ll begin with a training course to teach you the basics of jumping, attacking, and dashing. If you need a refresher, you can redo the training at any time. At first, you start off with three hit points and one hundred fuel. These can be upgraded during a drill run if you stumble upon a vending machine and have enough gold on hand to temporarily boost your stats.

After successfully making it down a randomly generated tunnel, you’ll have an opportunity to visit a store to purchase skills. Once a skill is purchased, you’ll reap the benefits immediately no matter if your skill points are already maxed out. However, you will have to pay with blue crystals to make it available permanently. In the event that you die, the gold you’ve excavated during your run will be converted to blue crystals at a 20:1 ratio.

Before starting another run, you can change out your appearance/skins and deck of abilities/skills with upgrades that have been purchased with blue crystals. Your character is limited by skill points and you’ll have to make some tough decisions on which skills to equip with the points available. I recommend equipping skills that increase your max health and give the option to randomly receive more fuel or health boosts. There are other skills that can spawn helpers or increase your attack/jump/dashing abilities.

Most of the levels have a side room that can be accessed by flipping the switch to the door. Inside of these rooms you may stumble upon a vending machine for additional health/fuel capacity, free power-ups, or a huge gold quarry to mine. You’ll often find a fuel or health power-up too.

Power-up stations can be found on most if not all levels. These will give you a power-up free of charge. If you’re not happy with the one provided you can switch back to your previous one that was dropped on the ground. There’s a wide variety of power-ups including ones that slow down time, freeze enemies, teleport you, or exterminate enemies with a shotgun. The teleport power-up is super handy, but glitchy. I managed to warp myself into a wall and had to exit the game and lose the progress for that run.

UDO has a retro vibe to it with the pixel art and chiptune inspired background music. The enemies are not very detailed, but there is a decent amount of variety to them. Some just move around while others explode or hurl projectiles your way.

You’ll be drilling and killing enemies, but there’s no blood. UDO is pretty family-friendly.

If you enjoy rogue-like or vertical platformers, UDO is worth checking out. It’s a challenging game, but has me always coming back for more. Even though I’m not that good at it, I want to give it "one more try". I just wish it had Steam Cloud support so my progress would transfer over between devices.