Bit of a strange choice to me for the sequel to Dig Dug to essentially remove one of the most interesting elements of its gameplay but I get that a lot of arcade sequels seemed to have an interest in seeing what radical ways they could shift gameplay ideas around to make it feel sufficiently distinct. My main issue really stems more from the fact that the gameplay style they ended up settling on is something that straight up doesn't work even if it's a cool one in theory. Turning each of the huge number of stages of the game into a sort of top down puzzler where you could take out huge chunks of enemy waves by making them sink into the sea with bits of the island. The issue stems from the fact that the enemies are all so aggressive that there's literally no time to actually enact any plans you could come up with, with the stages feeling more about madly killing as many of them as possible before they swarm you than actually putting yourself in some more truly advantageous positions.
You could argue that there's an element of risk-reward to destroying bits of the island with enemies on them, with the way that taking out larger quantities of enemies can often lead to dramatically smaller spaces to avoid the ones that are left, but it is yet another element of the game that feels too far geared against the player. Unless you kill basically all the enemies in the first couple bits of the island you get rid of (something incredibly difficult to do when you're having everyone beeline towards you), it's just a death sentence and doesn't really have any sense of dynamics to it. A big part of the problem comes from the fact that there's no real and easily usable form of crowd control in the game that warrants making you be at a complete standstill whenever you actually want to attack something.
The first game's digging mechanic paired excellently with the slow methods of dispatching things because you could largely control the flow of where things would be for long enough to put you into an advantageous position, rather than in here where you're immediately thrown into the deep end and basically required to not think too hard about interacting with one of the main points of interest that the game could have. That's really my main problem with the game more than the absurd difficulty, the fact that it's almost as if you're encouraged to not properly interact with a lot of the defining characteristics of the game once you get beyond the first few stages, it just makes for a very hollow experience that could have been something way better with a few other tweaks to the design.
You could argue that there's an element of risk-reward to destroying bits of the island with enemies on them, with the way that taking out larger quantities of enemies can often lead to dramatically smaller spaces to avoid the ones that are left, but it is yet another element of the game that feels too far geared against the player. Unless you kill basically all the enemies in the first couple bits of the island you get rid of (something incredibly difficult to do when you're having everyone beeline towards you), it's just a death sentence and doesn't really have any sense of dynamics to it. A big part of the problem comes from the fact that there's no real and easily usable form of crowd control in the game that warrants making you be at a complete standstill whenever you actually want to attack something.
The first game's digging mechanic paired excellently with the slow methods of dispatching things because you could largely control the flow of where things would be for long enough to put you into an advantageous position, rather than in here where you're immediately thrown into the deep end and basically required to not think too hard about interacting with one of the main points of interest that the game could have. That's really my main problem with the game more than the absurd difficulty, the fact that it's almost as if you're encouraged to not properly interact with a lot of the defining characteristics of the game once you get beyond the first few stages, it just makes for a very hollow experience that could have been something way better with a few other tweaks to the design.