Been playing some Deep Rock Galactic with friends for the past couple of evenings — we finally found a game that all of us are actually interested in playing.
I'm impressed, but also a little surprised — this game is apparently three years old, and yet for some reason it only appears to have come to prominence relatively recently. I wonder if this is another case of Among Us, where something becomes popular well after its original release after an article or video in the right place at the right time.
Anyway, if you've not come across Deep Rock Galactic the concept is relatively straightforward. As a space dwarf with a completely unidentifiable accent, you are tasked with completing an endless string of dangerous subterranean missions of various types. Sometimes you might be retrieving alien eggs; others you might simply be mining for specific resources; others still you might be setting up pipelines between drilling equipment and an on-site refinery rocket.
There are four character classes to play, each with their own distinctive loadout that contains primary and secondary weapons, some sort of "traversal" device, and a special weapon of some description. In my case, I've been playing the Engineer class, for example, so in true Engineer tradition he has a shotgun, a grenade launcher and the ability to built gun turrets — plus his traversal ability allows him to create platforms.
The game features procedurally generated levels so even two of the same type of mission in succession don't play identically, and the fully deformable, destructible terrain means that you can often cut your own path to your objectives. One of the classes, the Driller, actually specialises in this.
The game doesn't present you with constant all-out action — at least not on the levels we've been playing on so far — but rather has a nice pace of allowing you to get stuff done, occasionally punctuated by "swarms" of enemies that you have to deal with. In traditional co-op first-person shooter tradition, completing certain objectives also brings on hordes of enemies before you can proceed — in the pipeline-building missions, for example, you have to hold off enemies and repair your pipes while you're pumping the resources back into your refinery rocket.
The whole thing has a nice vaguely low-poly look to its environments, coupled with nicely stylised characters and pleasant use of colour. The voice acting is beyond dreadful, but thankfully this is a game about mechanics rather than story, so you can get used to things pretty quickly! Most importantly for a game like this, it plays well — the first-person controls are responsive and work well, and some nice additions to the usual formula such as the ability to grab and climb ledges make getting around pretty straightforward in most instances.
Crucially for our particular group, who tend to play sporadically at best, there is progression in the game, but it's not the sort of progression where the longer you play the more ridiculously powerful you get. Rather, you unlock perks and can upgrade your weapons with a few additional benefits — but none of these are game-breakingly powerful. As such, if any of us decide that we want to play a bit on our own, we don't risk leaving the others behind in terms of progression; each mission is what it is on its own terms.
I'm impressed so far. I'll be interested to see if it holds our interest in the long term, but signs are good so far.
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