BERGWERK - A Mining Sim Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Maybe
A coal mining sim, first or third person, where you drive fifteen bits of heavy machinery through a tutorial mine. The mining itself works. The camera and the vehicle handling need work before this feels right for the audience it is aimed at.
Bergwerk is a coal mining Simulation set in a fictional German region called Grubental. You build a colliery on the surface, dig procedural depths underneath, drive fifteen heavy machines, and eventually sell coal on a dynamic market. I picked it up because I was completely sold on the idea of operating heavy machinery. Forty minutes on the tutorial shift showed me the mining part clearly enough, and left me with two things I want fixed before I would come back for a full shift.
My verdict is a Maybe. Bergwerk does what it says on the tin. You are in a mine, you are operating heavy machinery, and the mining loop itself is real work. But the camera and the vehicle feel are where a coal-mining sim lives or dies for the audience it is chasing. If the team tighten the mirrors, sort the third-person cab view, and put another pass over the vehicle physics, this gets closer to a Play. Right now it is one for the patient. Wishlist on Steam if a proper heavy-machinery sim is the reason you are here.
Pros
- Twin-arm dynamite drilling then rock-bolt securing is a real mining loop that teaches through use
- Welcome Underground tutorial shift walks the whole extract-stabilise-transport chain in one sitting
- Pickaxe holds instead of clicks and coal sacks stack in the cart; the small stuff is already well-handled
Cons
- Third-person camera floats out the top of vehicles, wing mirrors show nothing useful, and the camera-switch key on V is not surfaced until you have already needed it twice; reversing the shuttle loader turns into guesswork
- Vehicle physics feel loose and there is no crash damage; for players who signed up for a Simulation at the realistic end, the current handling undersells the pitch
Pre-Patch Note
After this session the dev pushed an update targeting the camera and the minecart clipping discussed below. I have not retested against the patched build, so those observations are pre-patch. What follows is a faithful account of the demo I played.
The Tutorial Shift
The demo drops you into an established mine on a guided tutorial called Welcome Underground: a simple day in the life of a coal miner, digging holes, stabilising the tunnel, transporting coal out to the mine shaft. Pickaxe first, hold the mouse and it mines. That was a small win before I had even worked out what I was doing, because I was expecting to click every chunk. Next came the shovel and the coal sacks. A tutorial popup for pick up and put down turned up a beat late. I was already shuttling bags into the coal cart by the time it appeared, and I ended up shovelling until the ten thousand target went green.
From there the game stacks machines up quickly. The roadheader wants a shuttle car attached to the back before it will excavate the marked tunnel section. I spent a couple of minutes confused before I worked out that T attaches them. Head modes rotate the drum, water dampens the dust, and the arm extends to reach the top and bottom of the seam. The view kept sliding outside the tunnel while I was mid-excavation, which broke the immersion slightly. The one thing I really wished I had been shown up front is the camera-switch key on V, because I would have used it constantly in the shovel work five minutes earlier.
The dynamite section is a proper mining loop. Drilling ten holes into the tunnel face with the twin-arm mining drill. Gauging distance is hard from third person, so I flipped to first and worked the two arms in sync. Then a pallet of dynamite off the wagon, one stick per hole, fuses connected, plunger, boom. The second half of the same loop is drilling five more holes for rock bolts to secure the newly opened ceiling. I got an "arm fully extended" error halfway through, retracted, drove a little closer, and finished.
Camera and Physics Problems
The game then asks you to shuttle three loads of coal out on the low-seam underground loader, and the friction I had been softening starts to bite. The third-person camera floats out the top of the cab and refuses to look behind me. In first person I was looking straight into the back of my chair. Wing mirrors on the loader do not show anything useful. Reversing turns into guesswork. I ended up running over one of my own coal carts on the way back to the shaft. I pushed three, arrived with two, and could not work out why until I replayed it in my head. Hold-F to push a cart along on foot is another thing I only found by sitting there trying every key.
The vehicles feel slightly scuffed on the physics too. Carts glitch into each other and refuse to separate. Machines clip the tunnel walls with no consequence, and when they do connect they bounce off the wall in a way no heavy vehicle would. The no-damage part I am torn on: if the game did apply damage I would have wrecked most of it by being bad, so I take the trade. But for the audience this game is aimed at, the ones who want a proper heavy-machinery Simulation, the answer needs to be more than no damage because you are bad.
Scope and Fit
The tutorial ends on "you've only scratched the surface", and the shift I did not get to is presumably the Management layer the store page promises: acquiring land, planning the colliery in top-down view, running the coal market, taking loans. A red machine sat by the exit that I did not get to touch. Operating the heavy machinery is the strongest beat right now. If there is a way to hire miners as the mine expands so you can sit on the planning side, I would come back for that. Right now I am always the one behind the wheel, and there is only so much of that a single player can carry.
There is a decent physics anchor sitting on my hard drive: Lawn Mowing Simulator 2. Different scale, but the mower in that game felt more real from a physics and operation point of view than any vehicle I drove in Bergwerk. I am not asking Bergwerk to be that game. Whoever is tuning the vehicles here would find a lot in the small responses on that mower.
Developer: Hindsight Studios / Aerosoft GmbH
View on Steam
Watch the complete live play on YouTube
Tags: Simulation, Management, Indie
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