Survivors-like games are getting a bit of a reputation, I think. Since Vampire Survivors took the world by storm, we’ve seen dozens upon dozens of imitators. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is one such imitator, but I’ll cut straight to the chase; there is a lot more going on here than in your standard asset-flip rip-off.
After trying the demo last year, my first thought when playing the Early Access version of the game was: “bloody hell – someone turned up the difficulty!” The opening couple of hours are tough, maybe even a bit grindy, there’s no getting around that. However, this early game spike is clearly by design, and after having spent around 10 hours with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the progression system will benefit from fine tuning, but it doesn’t need an overhaul.
What is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor all about then?
I’m not going to assume anything here, and so I’m going to try and give you all the context you need. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is an auto-shooter with a mining twist, where you must take a dwarf, dig up precious minerals and then smash horrible aliens.
The game hit Early Access on Steam just the other day, but it’s a spin-off of a well-known first-person shooter called… you guessed it: Deep Rock Galactic. I first played the original all the way back in 2018 when it too landed in Early Access. DRG is the very epitome of a “cult classic” and in the five or so years that people have been playing, the game has attracted a dedicated community.
This has allowed Danish developer Ghost Ship Games to look beyond the confines of their own title, and get into the publishing game. The developer-turned-publisher recently put out another game completely unrelated to DRG (SpellRogue) and that has been followed closely by Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.
So what makes it so tough, noob?
Wow – now I’m getting insulted by my own headings.
DRG Survivor has a pretty compelling gameplay loop that incentivises taking risks. The three biomes are each made up of several mini-missions, and in each one you get dropped off in a rocky cavern. Therein, you must dig out enough ore to fill your quota, cause enough damage to bring in the level boss, and then dispatch them and escape the map before a timer runs down and you’re stranded there.
By the end of the first round, you’ll be being chased around the place by a hulking great creature that wants to chomp on your hairy dwarven face. Each of the rounds has one of these bosses, and the final boss has several, followed by a big boss. He/she/they also want to chomp on your face – and more often than not they will.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor quickly descends into action-packed chaos, with a huge and growing swarm of insectoid aliens coming after you in a relentless wave of sharp limbs and spiky teeth.
Consider, then, that you are just a simple dwarf with a limited arsenal of weapons and a friendly bot to keep you company. In the face of these constant waves of nasty creatures, it’s somewhat reassuring that the game is actually pretty damn hard.
Survivor-liking the differences
I think the thing I like best about DRG: Survivor is the new dynamic added by the mining part of the game. The minerals that you extract from the rock and stone around you not only serve to enhance your character and their weapons in the run, but they also feed into the overarching meta-progression.
Part of what makes DRG Survivor so tough at the start is the fact that all of your dwarves are total noobs. With the resources you pick up while mining – and there are loads of different types of mineral deposits – you can level up your whole roster of dwarves (there are four in the game at the time of writing). It takes a while, but eventually you’ll have bulked up your damage output, boosted your crit chance, and toughened up a little. These incremental upgrades really help.
Going back to the mining – I also like it because of the friction it creates around your traversal of each level. You can cut new pathways in the rock and beasts will follow you down them. This allows you to create bottlenecks to funnel enemies into, as well as escape routes that can get you away from a huge swarm of beasts just in the nick of time. So many survivor-likes struggle to create a worthwhile play-space, but that’s not the case here: the levels themselves add to the experience.
Before I move on to the next section, I would also like to say some nice things about the variety of the weapons and your progression through each one’s ability tree. As you level up in each mission, and between stages, you can increase their damage output, boost their fire rate or range, and even change the kind of damage they deal. Giving my mini-gun flaming bullets was a memorable highlight.
During every run, depending on your choice of character, you’re able to layer new weapons on top of your personal arsenal. This means that after a couple of levels you might have a shotgun and long ranged rifle, or maybe flame-spewing turrets and a high-powered pistol. The weapons you choose will shape how you play, and the turrets in particular will steer you towards a more tactical approach.
The Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor Roadmap
As originally covered here, there is already a roadmap for the game following its Early Access release.
The next update is going to focus on the droid that accompanies you on each dig. Bosco, as it is called, is currently somewhat under-used at the time of writing, and I look forward to seeing how this little fella is integrated into the action better.
There are already a fair few gameplay-enhancing items, which are usually thrown into the mission via supply drops. We’re promised more of these, plus more weapon overclocks, which we’ll need given the various difficulty stages that are waiting to be unlocked.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is already full of interesting items and weapons, a solid progression loop, and challenging missions that put a fresh spin on what’s already starting to feel like a well-worn sub-genre. There’s a way to go, with the game due to sit in Early Access for six to 12 months, but what’s there is in good shape and well worth the price of admission.
