After over a year in Early Access, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is ready to shake off the EA tags, at the same time as the auto-shooter makes its first appearance on Xbox. The question is: how does the pint-sized action-roguelite compare to the best bullet heavens, including the likes of Vampire Survivors and Brotato?
A great spin-off
There are loads of auto-shooters out there that are made out of the bones of another game. There’s nothing wrong with that, don’t get me wrong, but this is not an asset flip and Funday Games has built this from the ground-up to its own thing.
The Deep Rock Galactic universe has proven extremely popular over the years. It’s not quite a roguelite but it sits close thanks to the replayable gameplay loop and proc-gen cave systems. DRG Survivor feels like a natural extension of this loop, but with a perspective shift and a bunch of new ideas thrown in for good measure.
What do you do, then?
DRG Survivor has you splitting your time pretty evenly between character levelling, alien splatting, and stone smashing. There are loads of different resources hidden in the rock formations that split up each biome, and you’ve got to tunnel into them to grab the riches all around. Doing so gives you the resources required to add new gear and then level it up.
There are four different dwarfs to choose from, and each has their own starting speciality to focus on. Well, there are three actually, but you have to unlock two of them through play. You start with the scout, but there is also a gunner, an engineer, and the driller to unlock over time. That’s four classes and 12 sub-classes, all told.
More interesting character development comes from the new gear system. Now, as you play you’ll get various bits of tech, which you can then assign to each character as you see fit. There’s a bit of upgrading and tinkering to be done here, but I’d say it’s more of a “nice to have” feature for commited players in for the long haul, rather than something that makes a tremendous amount of difference for noobs.
With new gear and sub-classes unlocking over time, each one of the characters can be developed individually. That said, overall base stat upgrades are applied across the board. This shared progression does explain why the meta-game is a bit grindy with only minor incremental upgrades offered over time, but I think it’s preferential to have one shared pool of passive upgrades than having to mess around with the micromanagement for four different characters.
Rock and Stone
DRG Survivor comes to life when you drop into battle. There are two main ways to play the game, but both of them involve exploration, mining resources, tactical positioning during combat, and the odd in-game objective to complete.
There are five biome types, and each one throws in a new wrinkle to contend with. From start to finish: you drop in, dig up some gold and nitra, blast any enemies as best you can, and then extract when the work is done. More than likely, you’ll get swarmed by an army of horrible bugs. Failure to get in the pod once your main mission is done results in a game over, so you’ve always got to consider your escape.
There are loads of different enemy types, each with their own abilities to contend with. The bosses are particularly difficult, especially when you start having to deal with two at the same time.
Armed and dangerous
The best bit about DRG: Survivor, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the toolkit at your disposal. There are loads of weapons to unlock and they have a range of different uses. Each one can be levelled up over the course of a multi-stage dig, and you can have four equipped at once.
There’s loads of mixing and matching to be done, plus weapon evolutions that add greater potency to your arsenal. Once you’re fully armed and rocking upgraded weapons, you can start to really chew through the waves of enemy bugs and control the swarm.
After a few levels the screen will start to fill up with huge packs of different alien types. With a full set of weapons equipped, your return fire will light up the screen. It’s a genuine feast for the eyes, and there’s something super satisfying about running around to grab up all the fluorescent XP that drops from fallen foes.
The grand finale
Each dive takes place over multiple rounds, and death at any time means a reset. Naturally, each round gets a bit tougher, until the final boss battle at the end. The original game mode was a simple sequence of battles against mid-bosses before a final fight against a bigger boss (or two). However, a new mission type called Escort Duty has just been added, and this mixes things up a bit.
These new missions take place on longer, narrower maps. There are oil spills all over, which you must mine in order to power a giant digger across the level. At various points you’ll have to stop for more fuel or to clear a landing zone ahead of a loot drop, and at the end there are several triggers to activate before the pod comes to extract you.
Both modes end with a big showdown. In escort mode you must keep the bugs at bay while extracting your target: a giant rock called the Heartstone. You do this by staying in a capture zone until the timer runs down; with a screen full of nasties trying to eat you, that’s easier said than done.
Both of the main ways to play the game result in frantic finales, and sometimes you’ll fall on your way to exit, once the hardest bits are done. Those moments hurt, for sure, but the game feels fair and balanced and a quick restart gives you a chance to fix your mistakes.
The final version of DRG Survivor meant a full reset of my progress, but I didn’t mind one bit because the progression loop is interesting enough to keep me engaged, and the gameplay is exciting enough to keep me on the edge of the seat.
At the start of this review I posited the question: how does Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor stack up against the best in the business? Well, after working through the game again this last week for review, I’ve come to the conclusion that DRG Survivor compares very favourably indeed. In fact, it must be my favourite auto-shooter since Vampire Survivors!
