Deep Rock Galactic is the Best Co-Op Shooter in a Decade

I really like first-person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. This is fine in single-player settings, because I can fail as many times as I want and not feel too much shame, but in competitive shooters I’m a wreck. It’s not enough that I suck and constantly hover towards the bottom of the leaderboards in any match, I feel bad because I know I’m dragging my team down. I had to stop playing Rainbow Six Siege because, despite the fact that I love that game, I was so awful I was completely useless at best and got insults screamed my way over mic at worst. This weird mix of low skill and low self-esteem keeps me away from a whole host of PvP games, so I eventually went looking for PvE shooters to play. I can defeat AI enemies just fine, maybe with a team backing me up, it’d be easier. This is a reason I liked Left 4 Dead and its sequel so much. Something about the cooperative nature of those games alleviates my unnecessary anxieties about Playing Well and lets me have fun. I’ve been looking for good co-op shooter experiences since.

I came to Ghost Ship Games’ space dwarf simulator Deep Rock Galactic relatively early in its life as an Early Access game on steam (it originally launched there in February 2018); early enough to get to watch the game get polished and expanded over the months and years leading up to its May 2020 1.0 update. From the beginning, the concept was always a winner: Play as one of four classes of dwarven combat miners, delve deep into the massive subterranean networks of a hostile alien planet, mine precious minerals, and shoot a staggering amount of angry bugs. The caves are dynamically generated, so every mission is unique (missions are also generated from a selection of objectives, sub-missions, biomes, and modifiers). The real genius of the game is that those proc-gen cave systems are completely deformable. Nothing stands in the way of your pickaxe for too long, and if it does, it’ll crumple like tissue paper in front of the Driller class’ massive twin excavation tools. If you don’t like the way a particular section of the cave is going, there’s a chance you can dig your way into a different one. Players are equipped with a 3D terrain scanner that does a good job of filling you in while looking admirably low-tech, making it difficult to truly get lost. As you go about your duties, you’ll be frequently attacked by the local flora and fauna, sometimes in massive waves that require a good amount of team coordination to survive. A player wandering off to do their own thing can spell their doom, and will sometimes cost the lives of the rest of the team as well. To encourage all four players to stick together, the game gives the four classes tools that synchronize with skillsets of the other classes. Any combination of two classes can do dramatically more together than they could alone. The engineer has a platform gun that shoots foamy structures onto walls that players can stand on. Use that to shoot under high-up outcrops of minerals, and the scout can easily use their grappling hook to zip up and access those previously-unobtainable goods. Sometimes mere platforms won’t cut it, though, and that’s where the gunner and their zipline launcher come in, allowing the whole team to traverse wide gaps at a steady pace. The zipline can’t fire at too steep of an angle, so it’s not great for getting down sheer cliffsides safely, but you know what is? The driller, who can simply bulldoze a tunnel to the bottom of the ravine for everyone’s usage. The class abilities are designed with other players in mind in a way that reminds me of Team Fortress 2’s often repeated, rarely beaten implementation of skills that interlock together in countless ways. The classes mesh in combat, too. The scout’s “inhibitor-field generator” (a grenade that slows all enemies caught in its blast radius) primes bugs to get wrecked by the gunner’s heavy weapons or the driller’s flamethrower. The engineer’s grenade launcher can punish entire swarms, but it can also be upgraded to knock the armor off of larger enemies, opening up their weak spots for players with weapons more precise than the engineer’s shotgun.

I’d describe Deep Rock Galactic’s tone as “raucous”. The game goes out of its way to instill your team with a general vibe of goofy camaraderie and bravado. Even if you’re not playing with a mic (most players I’ve been grouped with don’t), the dwarves are constantly gloating, bickering, or yelling at things in general. You can use a laser pointer on the back of your terrain scanner to point at enemies or objects in the cave, calling them out to your friends. The amount of dialogue the developers put into these callouts is impressive, and a very fun detail. They’re informative, but not at the cost of character, and they haven’t managed to get annoying to me, even after nearly 100 hours of play. Then there’s the salute button. Pressing it makes your dwarf raise his pickaxe and yell some variation of “ROCK AND STONE!”, the titular company’s motto. It has no impact on gameplay, but I press it dozens of times throughout most matches. It’s just a “hell yeah” button. It exists for no reason other than to allow you to be rowdy. Did your teammate do something cool? Rock and stone. Are you and your boys fresh off the drop-pod and ready to get their hands dirty? Rock and stone. Are you gearing up before on last onslaught? Rock and stone. It’s all-purpose and incredibly endearing. Whether you’re hollering with your buds while fighting a two-ton armored spider-crab or flossing to country music in the cantina while drunk on space beer, the game wants you to be having a good time with your team, even if you only know them for a single match.

Plenty of fans have played the game for longer than I have, and I doubt as many would have stuck around if it didn’t have so much replay value. To start, each of the four classes has upgrade trees for every item in their toolset, including much larger upgrade paths for their weapons. Play a class long enough and you’ll earn the right to unlock alternate primary and secondary weapons, each with their own nuances and upgrades. Keep at it from there and you’ll get to promote that class, which unlocks the game’s complex endgame systems. Any class you’ve promoted can take on Deep Dive challenges, two sets of weekly seeded mega-missions that are designed to put your team to the ultimate test. You also unlock “matrix cores”, cartridges that contain weapon skins, player accessories, or weapon mods with far-reaching changes to your arsenal. The hunt for matrix cores is slow but rewarding, and the Deep Dives have quickly become one of my favorite weekly gaming activities. Combine these hooks with the fact that the developers have big plans to continue updating the game throughout 2021, and I see myself putting in another 100 hours soon.

I have complex feelings about a lot of games that have tried to come for Left 4 Dead’s crown. The Vermintide games have a satisfying melee combat system, but a pretty hefty set of overly pricey DLC packs you’ll need to access further missions. Payday 2 has a tight, satisfying gameplay loop bogged down with confusing extra mechanics, an overwhelming amount of content, and a game engine buckling under its own weight. Killing Floor 2 has some of the best feeling weapons in any FPS I’ve played, but also a barebones progression system and a massive difficulty spike between the medium and hard difficulty settings. Deep Rock Galactic has unique weapons and characters that all feel rewarding to master, a dedication from the developers to make all gameplay content drops free (there are a small handful of paid cosmetic armor packs for those who want them), and one of the warmest communities I’ve found in my years of online gaming. I couldn’t recommend it more, and I’m happy to have finally found my online co-op comfort food.