A steambot town in a dusty western landscape hides a mystery beneath its streets, with earthquakes traced to an old technology and a doom cult as the hook that pulls a young digger ever downward. The town cast above ground charms in a Banjo-Kazooie-adjacent register of dry, pun-adjacent banter, and the surface world threads a rocket project, a bumbling mayor and a shiner-covered villager through the otherwise subterranean focus. It is a realised art style upgrade over its predecessor across the board, and the western-meets-robot worldbuilding carries the whole thing with a confidence the shorter first game only gestured at.
The exploration-and-upgrade loop is the engine: dig for minerals, surface to sell, spend on pickaxe, jackhammer, bombs and armour, and toggle cog mods that reshape each run. Refundable cogs are the standout player-friendly touch, letting a bad build be rolled back at no cost. Tool-based gates reopen earlier areas, feeding an habitual 100% area sweep, and caves and temples interleave the digging with mine-cart block puzzles on a whole other level from anything else in the genre, arrow chambers and lava gauntlets rounding the set out.
The hook shot transforms traversal mid-run, firing in any direction and latching onto nearly anything, and the jetpack, midair shooting and long-range grappler follow as a steady drip of new toys. Checkpoint and fast-travel density is generous, the marker system keeps orientation easy, and secrets are plentiful without being obtuse. Light and fuel management exists, but late upgrades neutralise it deliberately, a satisfying purchase in itself. Roughly ten hours cover an effectively 100% blind run, roughly triple the first game’s span and richer throughout.
Forty-plus artifacts hide in the walls, each with pun-filled flavour text that had to have been written by someone having far too much fun, and reading every one becomes its own reward. The comedic writing extends through dry townsfolk dialogue and cross-series continuity that lands as a delight for anyone with broader series knowledge. Few collectible layers in the genre reward the completionist impulse with writing this good.
The single most repeated mechanical complaint is the inability to use the pickaxe while airborne: blocks cannot be destroyed mid-jump, only shot, and the restriction culminates in a messy final boss where enemies spawn on the player and the boss itself can tumble into acid. Harsh fall damage constantly punishes exploratory digging, adapting to it is part of the learning curve but it never quite stops stinging. A wall-jump hitbox grind for an early-area secret and a poisonous jungle area both test patience in isolation, though neither spreads its frustration beyond its own borders.
Optional trial dungeons were skipped entirely, their token reward a proof-of-completion artifact that reads as homework rather than prize. The endgame strip removes the map and support systems for atmosphere, an accepted intent that still disorients, and filling in the map by digging every tile is a despised genre convention this game happily perpetuates. A late-game grind for the final jetpack upgrade, roughly two hundred dollars short after heavy cog spending, sends the hunter back to respawning enemies. None of it dents the whole.
Overall, a joyful, generously written digging adventure whose traversal toys, refundable upgrades and pun-laden collectibles more than compensate for finicky edges: a restricted airborne pickaxe, harsh fall damage and a scrappy finale. Ten hours of 100% completionist satisfaction in a realised art style makes this the definitive version of the series’ digging formula.
