Comparison

DrillKing vs Nova

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

DrillKing

Explore alien planets, mine valuable minerals, and construct your own colony. Upgrade your drill and facilities to unlock new technologies and help your home world. Strategic planning is key to success in this interstellar resource-gathering adventure.

Highlights
  • Explore 5 distinctive planets
  • Mine minerals and resources
  • Build and upgrade colony infrastructure
  • Develop new technologies
  • Complete quests for rewards
  • Trade for minerals
Features
Read full description

Drill down planet surface, mine minerals, craft buildings and upgrade your drill to build your own colony! Simply shake your device to handle various events and make progress! Features Drillking is a game where you mine minerals and build colonies on extraterrestrial planets. There are 5 distinctive planets to explore. Colonize each planet, dig up minerals, develop new technology, and help your home world Earth. How to play Drill down Planet surface to mine Minerals. Use them to build and upgrade infrastructures for your colony. Each Planet has its unique set of Minerals. You must plan carefully where to drill and what to upgrade. Some Planets are restricted, due to its strange gravity. To access these Planets, you must upgrade your Drill. DRILL: The main mining device. The deeper you dig, the more Mineral types you'll find. FACTORY: This is where you extract Minerals from ore. Upgrade Factory to increase mining speed. DEPOT: This is where you keep your Minerals. Upgrade Depot to increase its max Mineral capacity. You can trade Star for Minerals in Star Refinery, but you must unlock it first. PRO TIP: Always check Quests! Quest rewards are very helpful for easier progress. Some Quests will unlock super-effective Lab contents. Tap Comm Sat on the left for helpful tips. Synopsis Planet Earth, 327 Space Year. The human race faces a new crisis, as increasing number of population consumed most of available resources. Scientists began a project to craft an All-terrain mining vessel, capable of drilling any surface to mine minerals… …and after 5 years, The vessel is complete, and an inhabitable planet with rich amount of minerals is found. The New Frontier awaits you! Notes Your data is saved in the device. If you change device, or delete the app, all save files will be terminated. Deleting the app will terminate all save files.

About

Nova

Command a star fleet in a real-time galactic conquest game. Engage in strategic battles, forge binding diplomatic contracts, and manage your empire efficiently. Play at your own pace, from quick sprints to long campaigns, with background notifications keeping you informed.

Highlights
  • Real-time galactic conquest
  • Binding diplomatic contracts
  • Fog of war for strategic depth
  • Customizable game pace and duration
  • Background notifications
  • Map editor for custom galaxies
Features
Read full description

You command one star at the edge of a contested galaxy, with a few hundred ships in the garrison and a clock counting down. Everything else is neutral, or held by a rival who wants it as badly as you do. Hold the most living stars when the mission timer ends and you win. Knock every rival out first, and you win early. Nova is a real-time space-strategy game of galactic conquest for two or more players. Every commander starts with exactly the same star, ships, and credits, so games are won by decisions, not dice. A war of decisions. You move under fog of war, seeing only what your own stars and scouts can reach, so a spy probe before an assault is often worth more than the ships it costs. The defender always holds the home-field edge, which means you have to outnumber a garrison by better than three to two just to fight to even odds. Capture stars, build factories, and your fleets and treasury compound together; spend on speed, range, or battle power and the advantage carries across your whole empire. Drop a nova bomb and a star is gone for good, which denies it to a rival but scores it for no one. Diplomacy you can hold someone to. Talk in-game on a global channel or in a private thread with a single commander. Then make it binding: a contract offers another player cash outright, or only if they send the fleet you ask for, to the star you name. The moment they accept, the cash moves and the fleet launches on their behalf, and it cannot be recalled. Alliances are only as good as the deals behind them, and here the deals actually stick. Set the pace yourself. A game's host decides how long it runs and how fast its clock turns. Spin up a one-hour sprint where production ticks every few seconds and the whole war is settled over a lunch break. Or stretch the same game over days or even weeks, a long campaign you think about between meetings and come back to when something shifts. Any player can propose a pause for sleep or work, and once a second player agrees, the whole game freezes, deadlines and all, until it resumes. Let it run in the background. You never have to keep the app open or refresh anything. Nova notifies your device when it actually matters: a star of yours under attack, a shield that just blocked a spy probe, a fleet that reached its target, a message from a rival, a pause proposal, the game kicking off. Leave a slow game running for days and you will not lose the thread. Less micromanagement, more strategy. Fleets route themselves through your territory, so you can strike far beyond a single jump without plotting every hop. Standing orders turn a safe rear star into a supply pump: keep a garrison, forward the surplus, and reinforcements march to the front on their own while you think about the next move. Build your own galaxies in the map editor and play them with friends, or drop into a balanced Risk-style world for two to six commanders. Play from your iPhone, iPad or a browser against the same opponents; a game runs identically whether you join from iOS or the web.

Screenshots

DrillKing4 screens
Nova4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is review sentiment: Nova at 100% against DrillKing's 40%. Nova also leads on rating (5.0 vs 2.5) and in-app purchases (none vs 3). DrillKing's advantage is iOS requirement (7.0 vs 16.4). On price, ratings volume, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. DrillKing sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. Nova asks for nothing beyond the download.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

Nova holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 2.5. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2 and 4 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 40% of DrillKing's written reviews are positive against 100% of Nova's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly weekly. The most recent releases landed on November 2, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard5 real differences · 5 level
DrillKing versus Nova: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterDrillKingNova
PriceFreeFree
Rating2.5 (2 ratings)5.0 (4 ratings) — better
Positive reviews40.0% of reviews100.0% of reviews — better
Number of ratings24 — better
Update frequencyWeeklyWeekly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
MonetizationFree with in-app purchasesFree — better
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod — betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS7.0 — better16.4
Further details — not scored
Size145 MB51 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperJINOH ChoKevin Gilpin

Customer experience

DrillKing

All ratings2 ratings
Positive50.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative50.0%
Written reviews5 reviews
Positive40.0%
Neutral20.0%
Negative40.0%

Nova

All ratings4 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews1 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

In-app purchases

3 purchases

DrillKing

One-time3
  • DrillKing 100 Stars$0.99
  • DrillKing 350 Stars$2.99
  • DrillKing 1500 Stars$9.99
None

Nova

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is DrillKing free?
DrillKing is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Nova free?
Nova is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, DrillKing or Nova?
Nova is rated higher. DrillKing averages 2.5 out of 5 from 2 ratings, while Nova averages 5.0 from 4 ratings.
Do DrillKing or Nova have ads?
Neither DrillKing nor Nova shows ads.
Which is updated more often, DrillKing or Nova?
DrillKing ships an update weekly, and Nova weekly. Most recently, DrillKing was updated on November 2, 2026 and Nova on October 31, 2026.

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