Developer: Funday Games
Publisher: Ghost Ship Publishing
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor – Preview
It seems there is no short supply of Survivors-like titles in our current gaming landscape, as we have recently looked at the superbly made Nordic Ashes and Outer Terror, which also had a few very original mechanics. Now, we trade in Norse mythology and horror elements for dwarven miners who get swarmed by massive and horrific bugs while trying to mine for resources. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is currently still in Early Access and offers an overall enjoyable experience.
The general gameplay loop is what you’d expect from a Survivors-like title. You’ll pick a stage, a difficulty level, a character, and you’re good to go. You’ll have to make it through five levels in one stage, and you’ll have to do so by surviving for a fixed amount of time on each level and eventually killing the boss on every level. The final level has a tougher boss to beat, and if you kill it, you’ll be able to go home alive. The twist here, however, is that you’ll always have to extract within thirty seconds after beating a boss to be able to go to the next level. On top of that, this game introduces mining mechanics. As you’re playing a Survivors title that is based on the Deep Rock Galactic franchise, you’ll find yourself mining materials and digging yourself routes through the mud and rocks. By doing so, you’ll be able to boost your weapons during a run when you obtain gold and Nitra. Other minerals and items that are collected either contribute to the objective of the level you’re on or allow you to unlock permanent passive upgrades in between mining expeditions. It’s all fairly straightforward, and the overall progress of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is quite slow.
Experience is gained by killing enemies and picking up the experience they drop. When leveling up, you can unlock new passive boosts for the weapons, but also passive boosts for your character. You can upgrade the reload speed of weapons, the damage output, but also the fire rate. You can also choose health upgrades, faster mining capabilities, or even faster run speed if you don’t see a weapon upgrade you like. At fixed levels, you’ll also unlock a new weapon, and during each run, you can have up to four active weapons. As is common for the genre, you don’t have to fire or aim any of the weapons yourself, and everything will happen automatically. You, however, have to avoid all the incoming enemies, and possibly find enough escape routes to not go home in a body bag. All in all, everything feels very polished for an Early Access release in terms of controls and fluidness of the actual gameplay.
Even though the overall gameplay loop is extremely entertaining, the current issue is that there is hardly any content. You’ll be able to play through four different biomes with four different characters. Each biome has its own environmental hazards and each class has its own unique weapons and passive abilities. Even so, the different stages in the biomes just offer an increase in difficulty, and the class variations only change the character’s base stats and starting weapon. At the end of each run, on level 5, you’ll encounter the same boss over and over again, namely the Dreadnought. Due to this, every run starts to feel the same rather quickly. This is made even worse when you consider the fact that the weapon variety is also quite limited and the upgrades you get for leveling up are also basic passive upgrades for your character or weapon(s). As the game follows the same class system as Deep Rock Galactic, the FPS, we reckon that no new classes will be added. We do hope, however, that more weapons and a few more impressive leveling upgrades are added to the mix.
Conclusion
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor shows a lot of promise and already feels extremely polished for an Early Access title. The gameplay loop is enjoyable, the classes are quite diverse, and it’s very satisfying blowing so many bugs to bits. Even so, we do hope that a bit more weapon variety is added to the mix, as well as some new objectives and more powerful upgrades. That being said, if you’re a fan of Survivors-like titles and Deep Rock Galactic, picking this one up is a no-brainer.
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