What a pleasant surprise! Right in one of the slowest times of the year for new game releases, Nintendo’s elder handheld gets a really fun side-scrolling adventure game: Drill Dozer. With good level design and some great play mechanics, Drill Dozer is a terrific addition to the Game Boy Advance library at a time when GBA game releases are getting few and far between and the quality has been leaving a little to be desired.

Luckily for GBA owners, Nintendo has let developer Game Freak quit slaving in the Pokemon mines for a little while, and they have come up with a new game based on an entirely new intellectual property. In Drill Dozer the gamer plays as Jill, young daughter of the leader of a "friendly" gang of thieves. (I guess that means they smile at you as they rip you off.) The gang, known as the Red Dozers, has had a bit of trouble. Jill’s dad has been waylaid by a not-so-friendly gang of thieves called the Skullkers. Now that dad is in the hospital recuperating from the attack, leadership of the gang has fallen to Jill. When they attacked her father, the Skullkers also stole the Red Dozer's prized Red Diamond. Jill is determined to recover it.

As any good side-scrolling adventure game does, Drill Dozer plays out as a series of levels with a boss at the end of each. Pretty standard fare indeed. It is the actual level design and the way Jill moves through them that makes Drill Dozer a slight cut above the rest of the pack.

As a rather vulnerable child, Jill would not get very far just running around the levels. Enemies abound and there are many obstacles blocking her way. Luckily Jill has grown up learning to operate the most important tool of the Red Dozer gang: the Drill Dozer robot. Sitting in the Drill Dozer, Jill becomes much more than a young girl. The Drill Dozer can walk, jump ... oh yes, and drill. That drill can break through barriers and even take out the bad guys. At the beginning of each level the Drill Dozer is relatively well equipped, but by finding power-ups in the level it can be made more powerful. The Drill Dozer starts with only one gear for drill speed. Finding more gears speeds up the drill and makes it effective against more types of walls. To use different drill speeds the player has to shift the gears of the drill. A speed indicator will keep you apprised of drill speed. When shifting speed is attained, the player releases the drill button and then re-presses it, a bit like clutching in a car. Different enemies and obstacles will require more or less drilling power, so you don’t always have to shift up even if you have the gears to do it.

In addition to gears, the Drill Dozer can be equipped with different drill bits and drill types for special uses. The drill also has the ability to spin either in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. By alternating between the two spins, the player can achieve a kick back that will propel them away from what they have been drilling. Sadly, upgrades gained in a level are lost and the player has to start collecting all over again when a new level starts.

Since the Drill Dozer is the vehicle of movement, you can imagine that the levels are all about drilling different things … and you’d be right. Different types of walls and blocks will impede your progress as you make your way through the levels. One route may be blocked until you have been able to upgrade your Drill Dozer enough to punch through. In addition to the drilling there is naturally a fair amount of jumping about platforms involved. There are some small breaks from the drilling and jumping mechanics to add a little variety, but these small digressions are not quit as much fun as the main challenge. In the final analysis, the level elements all work very nicely with the drilling play mechanic. This simply makes the game fun to play.

Graphically the game is more than serviceable with nicely-detailed environments and smooth animation of the characters. The sound is only workmanlike, but it keeps the game moving along well enough and in no way detracts from the fun.

Rounding out this nice little game package is the addition of a rumble feature built into the cartridge. Don’t expect console-intensity shakes, but it really adds a bit to the game. Nintendo manages this by packing the rumble feature into a cartridge (muddy red in color by the way) that is about a third again as long as a standard GBA cartridge. It is a really neat little feature.

While it has some nice features, no one is going to mistake Drill Dozer for an all-time great game on the GBA handheld. At a time when so few GBA games are getting released, it does shine above its contemporaries, but it is after all just another really solid platformer for a handheld that has several competent entries in that genre. That earns it an equally solid "B" score.