Deep Rock Galactic has quickly turned into one of my favorite and most played games in recent times. It's got that perfect mix of extremely fun, simple and at the same time deep gameplay that you can get lost in for hours. Oh, and it features dwarves. Space dwarves. Space dwarves that you can dress up in silly outfits and go on drunk missions with. Do I need to even say more?
What is Deep Rock Galactic?
Deep Rock Galactic can best be described as a mission based co-op first person shooter. It's often compared to Left 4 Dead and Minecraft in that it features forced co-op gameplay against infinite hordes of enemy monsters while mining for resources in fully destructible and procedurally-generated caves. That one sentence basically summed up everything that the game is about.
Co-op is pretty much the name of the game with Deep Rock Galactic. You can play in groups of 1-4 players and doing so is highly beneficial to you. Missions will be completed both faster and easier. You won't be steamrolling enemies as a group seeing as there's a difficulty scaling based on how big your group is but missions become easier because you have access to a bigger set of tools from each different class.
There are four different classes that you can play as in Deep Rock Galactic. There's the Driller, the Engineer, the Gunner and the Scout who each bring a different set of tools to each missions. The Driller is good for quickly drilling through the caves while the engineer brings a turret for dealing with enemies and can also put up platforms around the caves for easier traversal of the terrain. Combining all of these skills together creates a great gameplay loop and efficient mining.
After giving all of the classes a spin I ended up playing the Engineer most of the time. I liked his weapons the most alongside his turrets and platform gun that makes for a fun way of traversing all the different caves. He also seems to be one of the more efficient classes for pretty much all missions types but that could just be because I've learned the class really well.
Extreme replayability
One of Deep Rock Galactics biggest strengths is in my opinion its extreme replayability. You're never going to play two missions that are exactly the same in this game. There are eight different missions types that can be played in ten different biomes. The mission objective in each of these mission types will always be the same but the biome will alter what you'll find in the cave. The Glacial Strata will feature a lot of frost, slowdowns and slippery ground while the Magma Core will have lava and other fiery dangers lurking in the shadows.
On top of this each missions can also have modifiers as either warnings or anomalies. Warning will usually impact you in a negative way like taking away your shields or having enemies heal if not damages continuously. Anomalies will however impact the mission in a positive way like containing extra gold you can mine for credits or giving you double exp. If that weren't enough you'll also randomly encounter special events during missions and because every mission is procedurally generated you practically have infinite replayability.
Simple but deep
Deep Rock Galactic is a perfect mix of simple and deep. Gameplay in itself is simple in that you go into a mission, you do the thing and you get out of there. Outside of that there are quite a few systems to interact with that the game eases you into by unlocking them over time.
As an example each class has a set of different weapons and gear that can be upgraded and modded to create different kinds of builds that can be made useful for different kinds of situations. There's also a perk system to grant passive and active perks to further customize these builds. Play long enough to promote a character and you'll unlock overclocks to further alter your weapons to create even more diverse builds. Even if you don't care to much about builds you'll still be able to play the game perfectly fine albeit maybe not on the higher difficulties.
There's also a metric shit-ton of cosmetics that can be bought for resources, found during missions or unlocked through the season pass. These are free season passes that change with each season every few months that also brings new gameplay mechanics to the game. That's one of those fantastic things about this game. Even though there are new seasons featuring new cosmetics every few months you never pay for anything. Everything is free and if you're not able to unlock whatever is in the season pass within a given season the items will simply be put back into the game to be unlocked by other means. This really is something special in this day and age where developers aren't afraid to milk gamers for money as much as they can.
I'm playing this game so much lately that you'll probably be seeing more posts about it as I progress through the game. If there's anyone out there playing this then feel free to hit me up in the Hive Gaming Discord and we'll play a few games together.
Rock and stone!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.