Mr. Driller Online offers 10 levels spread evenly between two game modes. In Standard Drill, the vanilla form of Mr. Driller, your goal is to simply cascade through levels while avoiding blocks you’ve dislodged as you maintain your depleting air supply. It’s simple but addictive gameplay, and nine years after the first Mr. Driller, it’s held up pretty well. Mr. Driller Online attempts to spice things up with Quest Driller, a sort of challenge mode where you’re given different rules by which you’re to abide. These rules change every 100 meters into a level, and vary from destroying a certain amount of blocks in a section before entering a new one to completing a section within a time limit. Overall, these challenges are pretty simple and fairly easy to complete, except for one that asks you not to die.

Death in Mr. Driller just happens sometimes, and while most of these challenges offer an interesting twist to levels, this one kills almost all the fun you might have had with Quest Driller. Let’s say you’re almost out of air, so you enter a new section in an attempt to find more air capsules in time, but you expire before you reach any. You had better hope your new quest wasn’t to stay alive. If it was, it’s back to the beginning of the level for you. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, you’re back to square one. It’s infuriating and thoughtless, and really, that describes Quest Driller pretty well. Instantly ending the level seems like the easiest way to penalize the player. If, perhaps, your air consumption was increased while you excavated the next section instead, or your movement was slowed for a certain amount of time should you fail a challenge, Quest Driller might be somewhat fun, but right now it feels more like a cop-out than anything.

A lot of Mr. Driller Online feels half-baked, and unfortunately Quest Driller is the tip of the Iceberg. After re-acquainting myself with Mr. Driller after a few years of absence, I was feeling somewhat adequate in my Drilling skills, and I wanted to check out the online portion. So, I selected Tag Battle (having no fucking idea what that meant) and tried a few games. My experience was consistently horrendous. Movement was sluggish, I was drilling the same blocks multiple times while they constantly popped back, and at one point I just died out of the blue. It was awful and, at first, I felt bad about it. I figured my connection was being fussy, as it often is, and I was slowing down the game for everyone else. After a short break that confirmed my connection was functioning properly, I came back to Mr. Driller Online. This time I tried Solo battle, thinking maybe Tag Battle had a few bugs, but it was equally frustrating. A few clicks in Firefox told me I wasn’t the only person experiencing issues. Unless you’re hosting, Mr. Driller Online is completely unplayable over Live. You’ll be lucky to dig ten meters into a level before the game ends or everyone (except for the host) leaves in frustration.

Mr. Driller Online isn’t all bad, though. If there’s one thing it does right, it’s in presentation. Aside from a few dated sprites, it looks solid. The select screen is colourful and vibrant, the blocks you’ll be destroying look delicious as ever, and the HUD is simple, easy to read, and completely functional. The soundtrack is cheery and eclectic, and fits Mr. Driller Online’s aesthetic perfectly. If you’ve played Katamari Damacy, it’s somewhat similar to that, just don’t expect quite as many tracks.

Sadly, overall, Mr. Driller Online is a failure. It’s a broken, cheap cash-in that hasn’t received the time and effort it desperately wants and deserves. And it’s a shame, because Mr. Driller isn’t a bad game. Even though it hasn’t changed much since its debut in 1999, and doesn’t exactly offer the kind of depth Tetris might, newcomers are sure to find a unique and exciting experience in Standard Driller. But with a broken online portion, no local multiplayer, and frustrating secondary modes, it’s hard to recommend Mr. Driller Online to anyone, especially at 800 Microsoft Points.