Perpetuum : Full Metal Planet

If there is one thing that you can say about the setting that the developers created for gamers to monkey around in, it's that it has no shortage of metal to mine. In this case, there is a strong similarity to EVE. Mining appears to be a major part of the game.

This is of course a double edged sword. Mining was an easy way to make money in EVE, and still is. But mining isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world to be spending your time doing, and it's slow. So while this does give anyone with time the ability to save up money to buy things in the market, you can expect to dump a few hours doing nothing but fly in slow circles around a floating rock.
Or in Perpetuums case, standing in front of a hold and shooting it with a mining laser. Yeah, I'm not too impressed, but it really does dovetail with what I was thinking about for the game. The look and feel of EVE is all over this product, so the minding grind isn't blindsiding me.

There is a question I have about the interface however. Mining is very awkward. You'd think that all you would have to do to pull the good stuff out of the ground is point a mining laser at a likely looking hill and then press the trigger. Right? No. What the interface is designed to do is make your mining more efficient. But part of me thinks that the designers are just trying to give players more buttons to press in an effort to make mining feel more involving.

Get this:
First you take your mining scanner, and put in an area charge, the charge specifically configured for one of 10 mineral types. Then shoot the charge. This will tell you if you have a hope in hell of finding the type of material you're looking for. Once you download the area data, you do the same thing, but with a 'tile' charge. Then when the tile scanner results are uploaded, you load the mining lasers with charges specific to the mineral you've found and then blast away.
And wait
And wait....

But it still beats the WoW grind hands-down.