This adds several new mechanics to the Cleansed experience, some of which are good ideas.
Instead of collecting shards from cleared areas, you need to deploy drills to mine them. Instead of being able to hand-clear tiles, you must deploy machines to clear them. There's also a hunger mechanic, leading to a race against the clock in the early game (later upgrades make it irrelevant). And then there's decay.
Drills both have a cap in the resources they can extract, and become less efficient as they go through those resources, slowing down your income. When the resource pool goes to zero, the drill (invisibly) becomes useless, and the tile becomes permanently depleted. In theory, this could have been a cool mechanic, forcing you to race to expand fast enough to stay ahead of depletion. In practice, this creates an incredible amount of micromanagement. And because of the cost scaling for equipment, this also creates a hard cap on the amount of drills you can deploy -- since past a point you can't earn back enough shards for the cost of the drill.
The other problems show up as the game scales. The early game, through around tier 4, scales well -- but the map is ABSURDLY large beyond that, and the last building and final upgrades come at the tier 4 level. Tier 1 tiles have 10 HP, Tier 2 has 400, Tier 3 has 24000, and it keeps going through at least Tier 9 (1e7 HP!!) even though your income reaches a cap and your efficiency stops getting upgraded. Also, since area/sector clearers are fixed in place once deployed, you have to keep tearing them down and rebuilding to keep making progress -- and when you do you have to enter the device menu and repeatedly click to change the speed from the default of 1 up to the 512 range. It gets tedious in endgame. I stuck it out through a day or two of carving a path to the edge of the 8 tiles, which already had long since lost its fun without any new goals to chase other than finding the top left of the map, and when I saw the size of the 9 tiles it just wasn't worth continuing. Accelerating your late-game drills requires actively casting spells every 15 seconds, and repositioning your clearers after cleaning each new chunk of land; you simply cannot idle your way through late barriers. Also, development has apparently been abandoned, so it doesn't seem like further upgrades will be added.
Overall, it's got some interesting ideas, but you should definitely stop playing after you reach the final building, because it gets VERY micromanagey and grindy for no benefit afterward.
EDIT: Play "Project Iridium" by the same author instead.