You know how people complain about Kid Icarus: Uprising or The World Ends With You inflicting hand pain? Drill Dozer is that game for me. Claw gripping the GBA just sucks, even on the original wide model, and it taints the whole experience to the point where I just can't enjoy it on its home system. Any game where ibuprofen is a required component is a no-go.

"Play it on the GameBoy Player!", I hear you say, and I have! That solves the hand pain but then you're left with the game, which isn't all that great. It's slow, clunky, and constantly sounds like a dental drill. It has great music, but in the climactic moments you'll barely be able to hear it because, you know, drill. The charm of the game is in the visual spectacle and the constant rumble but man, you can do so much better on the GBA. Wario Land 4 is right there.

I gotta play something good soon or I'm gonna lose my marbles.

Drill Dozer is clunky and slow - this is not a negative! It's fun to stomp around in this machine of destruction for that exact reason - the gameplay loop is really addictive, you collect semi-permanent power-ups throughout each level, and then lose them in the next, it's a loop I'd love to see in more games, and the game utilises backtracking very well, with the mystery of an inaccessible area, that you can go back to and demolish before you forget about it. A lot of fun ideas and set pieces are done with the drill too, I really like the jelly blocks and lifts. The graphics and character designs are fun and vibrant - there's a bit of Powerpuff Girls/Teenage Robot vibe to it, even if drawn a lot more smoothly instead of in the sharp UPA style.

Why is it missing a whole star then? Well, it's a 2000s platformer, and with that naturally comes two things: the first is genre swaps, and god damn the flying/underwater stages are the worst in this game. Might be the worst underwater levels ever, and you occasionally get some bizarre mini-game-kinda-not-really thing like opening a safe that just drags it down. The other platforming burden of the time this game is infected by is tutorials. This is a game-length tutorial, even in the final levels they're teaching you what to do instead of just trusting you to figure things out.

As much as I wanted to like Drill Dozer, the game has very significant flaws that I cannot overlook. The platforming is extremely bad and the drilling mechanics gets incredibly dull and repetitive a few hours into the game. It got to the point where I felt I wasn’t having a good time and wanted to wrap the title up. The last half of the game has some absurd difficulty spikes, making you wonder how did the devs at Game Freak expect players to react to certain situations when the platforming is so mediocre. That sky area, especially, is the absolute lowest point of this game to the point where I had to question if it’s even worth continuing this game. It was a very frustrating experience and I question if it was even play tested.

While I did love the music (it’s probably a more realized sound coming from the GBA era Pokémon games) and the beautiful sprite work, the last half of the game dragged so much for me that I will probably never be returning to this game ever again.