Dig For Your Lives

Free-to-play Early Access games are a mixed bag by nature, and Dig For Your Lives is upfront about exactly what it is: a solo developer's two-month prototype, launched free specifically to gather feedback. Mine underground by day for resources, spend them on gear, then defend your gate against zombies by night — solo, or with up to four friends. This review read its complete 29-review English sample in full, out of 52 total reviews sitting at Very Positive, to see how that pitch holds up in practice.

Chaos is the point, and reviewers love it for it

The reviews that stick out most aren't measured assessments — they're stories. "Get on with a couple of friends. Find a rock. Sell it. Get Explosive Arrows. Spawn camp your friends and destroy both the terrain and friendships. 10/10 Game to waste hours on," reads one review. Another: "22 dynamite next to your 2 friends crashed their pc very good game cant wait." A third specifically requests more of exactly this: "I would love if the jet pack could always explode... Loved the game 10/10." That pattern — reviewers treating destructive chaos as the actual selling point rather than an accident — recurs often enough to be the game's real identity, alongside more measured praise: "Amazing game! Love the upgrade aspect of it. Its also really fun to see the zombies ragdoll when you shoot them."

Real bugs, and a developer visibly chasing them

The negative side of this sample is small but specific, and this review checked each complaint against the patch history rather than taking either side at face value. One early review describes a genuinely broken launch state: "when I click on host game it rapidly cycles through day/night before stopping around late afternoon then spawns in my character on the right side of my screen. camera is fixed to one position." The developer's "V0.1 Compatibility Fix," posted two days later, opens with: "Big fix in After the gate breaks you should no longer be a floating camera or in a broken state" — a close, dated match. A separate review, five days later: "Mouse not moving, settings dont work...cant save settings, goes auto on exclussive fullscreen...poor development." A dedicated "Settings Fixes" update landed six days after that, explaining plainly: "Reworked settings setup, so that all machine should initialize them correctly... There were race conditions in the settings setup."

What stands out beyond the fixes themselves is how directly the developer communicates. One update post is titled, in full, "Hotfix 2 broke some stuff," with the entire body reading: "Rolling back to hotfix 1 for the time being." That's an unusually candid admission for any developer to make publicly, and it lines up with the launch-week pattern reviewers describe: real bugs, acknowledged quickly, sometimes imperfectly, but always in the open.

What's genuinely thin right now

Even the game's fans are honest about its current limits. "It works like a different perspective on tower defence, I really enjoyed playing it, even though it gets a bit repetitive and empty on the late-game. There should be more upgrades on the end, like buying new plots of land," reads one detailed, still-positive review. Another simply notes: "Played with a friend, quite fun but bare bones (obviously). Exited to see more!" A more critical positive review argues the balance leans too far from the game's own premise: "seems more like a shooter than a digger game, as someone who works the coal mines for 12 hours a day I thoroughly enjoy a shovel in my hands and not so much a bow for the majority of the game," going on to suggest specific pacing changes — shorter, more dangerous nights, and bow upgrades that feel more impactful for their cost.

Final verdict

Dig For Your Lives earns its Very Positive reception the honest way: it's free, it's genuinely fun chaos with friends, and its solo developer is visibly, rapidly iterating in response to exactly the kind of feedback this review's sample provides. The bugs reviewers describe are real, but this review found dated, specific fixes for the worst of them within days of each report, plus an unusually transparent willingness to roll back a broken update rather than leave it live.

Easy to recommend for a free hour or two with friends, with the clear understanding that this is a two-week-old prototype rather than a finished game — expect continued rough edges and rapid change rather than polish.

Players who want that same sense of a small project growing quickly in response to its community, built toward a persistent world with real long-term staying power, may also want to look at Wanderer.