Diggers

One of the better Lemmings-inspired games, Diggers is an interesting cross between Lemmings and The Humans, with a dash of Populous thrown in for good measure. The result is a fun strategy game with a lot of charm, although the awkward user interface takes a while to get used to.

Diggers lets you choose one of the four alien races, and lead them to fame and fortune by digging for gems. Each race has its own reasons for getting rich, and it's up to you, the master digger, to make their dreams come true. Although it looks like a Lemmings-style puzzle game, Diggers is actually a "light" strategy game that takes quite a while to finish. It certainly won't appeal to everyone, as you must patiently design your mines and guide diggers to appropriate spots.

Many business options abound, including the ability to deposit your money or take out loans from a bank, and upgrade equipment to improve efficiency. While mining various objects, you must avoid other miners (i.e. your competitors) and various hostile underground dwellers.

Although Diggers looks good and plays reasonably well, the control method used to move the diggers around is very clumsy. Worse, the diggers would sometimes do what you didn't tell them to do - this is frustrating, and seems more like poor programming than a feature... perhaps it's an "undocumented feature", i.e. programmers' euphemism for "bug" in their code ;) At any rate, Diggers does get quite interesting and fun once you get the hang of its quirky controls, and laying out mines is not so hard once you visualize the play area as a grid.

Overall, Diggers should appeal to Lemmings fans who are interested in seeing the concept transferred to a strategy/business game, although it doesn't quite match the charm of the furry classic, and does require tremendous patience to learn the ropes. If you like the game, check out the better sequel called Diggers 2: Extractors, also on this site. Recommended, but with some reservations.

Review By HOTUD