1UP writes: "I have a soft spot for the Mr. Driller games, those candy-colored spiritual successors to Dig Dug -- a fondness that has developed in spite of creator Namco's best efforts to dissuade me, it seems. The series' current-gen debut, the downloadable Mr. Driller Online for Xbox Live Arcade, is perhaps the company's ultimate effort in completely undermining any merit the series might once have had. It's a sloppy, half-hearted bit of slapdash effort that offers nothing more than the baseline level of entertainment inherent in the series' well-trod mechanics.
I hesitate to even call the game "current-gen" -- it runs in 720p high-def, sure, but not with anything like grace. The borders and menus are crisp and newly drawn, but the in-game visuals have a fuzzy look to them, as though they were taken from an older Mr. Driller title and scaled up to fit the HD dimensions. Talk about completely missing the point: One thing that made the series' debut so impressive was that the Dreamcast version ran in high resolution. It lent a clean, appealing style to a game whose simplicity might otherwise have seemed an ill fit for such a powerful console".
