Hello there children who yearn for the mines, WoodReviewer here with yet another game that revolves around mining, this time called simply Mines by Gold Rush Games. As child who was grounded as a child for digging a 3 foot deep hole in their backyard I do see the appeal of these games, however as I’ve grown I now know that there is more to being a good game rather than just digging a hole. Like proper wood grain. And I am here to play Mines and give a proper judgement on if the game has proper wood grain or not and oh the thumbnail shows a pickaxe with bad wood grain on the handle.

Still, although I have no issue with condemning games simply for having bad wood grain in the thumbnail, just this one time I will overlook it. I mean, it is a mining game. It isn’t like the game will have an entire spawn area that is built out of all wooden structures and other various other wooden assets. Wait, that is the entire spawn area?

By now you are probably thinking “WoodReviewer, I don’t have very high hopes for this game not having a ton of bad wood grain.” And while I would love to tease you some more on what exactly the bad wood grain is in Mines I think I need to just jump because it would fill out me entire BINGO card for things a game with bad wood grain would have. Like where do we even start? Mr. Crate is here, with bad wood grain on all of the vertical faces. And on the inner edges on the diagonal parts. And on the horizontal parts. Really it is just bad everywhere.

Next up my good friend Square Wooden Chair is back, but there is some nuance here. Only the front face of the chair legs are bad here, the sides are correct. Does this make it worse or better, honestly depends on the day, but if anything it shows no effort was put into the wood grain.

However if you are undecided which is worse do I have something for you: The table legs on every shop in the main area has bad wood grain on all faces, so no matter which way you think is worse Mines has you covered, unfortunately.

If you are a big fan of vertical pieces of wood having bad wood grain, one you are a sick individual, and two there are plenty more examples here. It can be seen on every building in multiple places, but is most noticeable on the main support pillar out front.

Another less noticeable one on the windows of buildings. This is a bit hard to see as you have to move around the building instead of walking directly up to it from when you spawn, but again not that hard to find since this entire area takes place within like a 200 square stud area.

Next up is an issue that has been visible in most of my screenshots, but the rails, aka the horizontal parts of the fence, have had bad wood grain in the background of almost every screenshot so far in this review. The wood grain on these rails should be horizontal, not vertical.

Finishing up my quick look around the spawn are of the map, the last thing I want to mention is the wooden signs in the game. They have proper wood grain somehow. I know this isn’t really important but just want to mention it if anyone misses out on a BINGO on it.

Moving on from the spawn area, the first thing you need to do is buy a pickaxe. As I am bad at planning I didn’t take any screenshots of this when I first played the game, so here is a screenshot of the pickaxe stall. Much like the thumbnail for the game the handles on both of these pickaxes are wrong, with both having horizontal grain instead of vertical grain. Also, the shelf in the background has bad wood grain, but I really want to move on from this spawn area and not spend the next 10 minutes describing every little detail on why it is even worse.

Especially when there is plenty more for me to describe that is wrong inside of the mine. The first and most obvious issue is on the cap, aka the horizontal part near the top of my screen that is running from between the posts. Here the wood grain should be following the direction of the wood, going between the two posts.

Next up is on the parts of the timbers running from the front to the back of the screen. I believe this are the collar braces, but it is such a bad recreation of what a mine actually looked like it is hard to tell. Anyway if you look at the above picture the wood grain on the bottom faces of these braces looks correct. However if you look at the side grain you’ll see that the grain is vertical, when it should be horizontal, going the same direction as the grain on the bottom of the timbers.

Going further into the mine and the next issue is from one of the many smaller shops that are inside the mine. These have main issues, from the table and crates from the overworld being here and bad, to the bottom of the timber face above the shp having bad wood grain, to the shelves that stuff is on being bad.

But I want to ignore all that and focus on that this small hammer that serves no purpose what so ever has bad wood grain on the handle for some reason.

Moving on from the mine, the last thing to talk about is some of the actual treasure you can dig up. I didn’t find all the things you could get that are made out of wood because I wanted to actually get this review out today, but I found some. The first being this minecart. The frame of the minecart is wrong, with the vertical frame at the front having horizontal wood grain and the upper frame not going from the front to the back of the minecart.

The next thing that I found that has bad wood grain is this section of minecart track I found. Here the ties for the track should go between the rails, but instead the grain on the ties goes with the direction of the rails.

And finally the last thing I found with bad wood grain, this broken spear. The grain here should go along the length of the shaft of the spear and not wrap around it.

And that was Mines. Or atleast a decent portion of it. The game hinted at there being more areas but after playing it for like six hours I hit a progression wall and don’t feel like playing it anymore to progress past that wall, especially with all the bad wood grain I already found. I mean mind you there was bad wood grain in the thumbnail, so that long is enough to condemn the game.