Digby Forever review
:: CAN YOU DIG IT?Price: Free
Version: 1.03
App Reviewed on: iPhone SE
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Digby Forever is an arcade game about digging… forever. It's an endless, free-to-play arcade game where you must dig down Dig Dug-style as far as possible before inevitably meeting your demise. While not a very complicated experience, Digby Forever sports hectic gameplay, a colorful art style, and unobtrusive free-to-play model, making it well worth checking out.
The downward spiral
Every game of Digby Forever involves you swiping around the screen to determine the direction that your character digs, with the ultimate goal of going as far down as possible. This isn't as simple as heading straight down, as the subterranean environment you're in is full of lava, mines, and monsters that you need to maneuver around strategically to stay alive. There are also crystals that you can collect to boost your overall high score.
As an endless game, Digby Forever doesn't have any levels. Instead, each time you play the game, a new layout of enemies and terrain is procedurally generated. The ultimate goal of the game is to try and get as high a score as possible without dying, though there are also plenty of side objectives to complete along the way.
Card customization
To help you in your quest for a high score, Digby Forever provides you with the opportunity to equip cards prior to playing. These cards act as modifiers to the standard rules of the game and generally give you ways to score more points. These cards can do things as simple as increasing your score for specific gems collected, but can also alter gameplay pretty significantly by doing things like allowing your drill to cut through lava or making all enemies move half as quickly.
On every run, Digby Forever prompts you to equip three of these cards, and this system helps vary up your experience each time you play. I wish the game gave you the option to horde cards you didn't want to use quite yet, or have better options for choosing card sets, but the core ideas of this system are totally solid and work in the game's favor.
Free-to-dig
With this card system, you could easily see how Digby Forever could build a bunch of nasty free-to-play hooks into how cards are earned. Fortunately, the game shies away from doing much in that regard, which is all for the better.
The free-to-play system at play in Digby Forever is straightforward, simple, and generous enough to keep the experience from being compromised. The game only has one kind of currency (coins), which you earn for doing just about anything in the game.
With these coins, you can unlock new skins, tile sets, or buy packs of cards. If grinding out the coinage for these things seems too slow for you, you always have the option of spending some cash to unlock things immediately. Finally, if you aren't way into the game to earn coins, but also not committed to spending any money in it, Digby also provides free cards to players every 30 minutes, which ensures that almost every time you play you benefit from the variety in its levels and card modifications.
The bottom line
Digby Forever is a tight little arcade game that presents new challenges almost every time you boot it up, and it does all this while avoiding most of the pitfalls of other free-to-play arcade games.