 So, as we wait through one of the year's slow time for games, I've been mostly replaying old stuff. I've been playing Doom on Nightmare as I wait for my most anticipated game in years, Doom Eternal. I replayed Half-Life 2 and the episode, which I think I'm going to make a video about, and I tried to play Dead Space 2 on PC through Steam or Origin, but it won't launch, so I'm waiting for two discs I got in eBay to arrive in the mail. I also went back to my Steam wishlist and found a title I'd been pretty excited to try but somehow just forgot about. With nothing else really going on, I bought Deep Rock Galactic. It's been in early access for almost two years, and after playing for about 70 hours with a final release coming up this year, I think I've seen most of what the game has to offer. So today, let's talk about the four-player PDE co-op shooter, minor, space dwarf exploration game, Deep Rock Galactic, after the logo. Just a pleasure. Deep Rock Galactic is a really well-designed little game. I've had a bit of trouble writing this script because it took me a while to kind of put my finger on why I love it so much. And while we will talk about its surprisingly perfect balance, its wonderful difficulty levels, and its amazing ability to make doing the same thing feel consistently fresh, I think we'll start with the thing that DRG does as well as any other game I've ever played. Deep Rock Galactic is, and there's really no better way to say it, it's just a charming game. Everything about it oozes charm from just the really fun way the dwarves are animated, to the hilarious voice lines, to the cute little robots who serve you beers at the abyss bar before your mission. Deep Rock manages to just put a smile on your face. The fact that it can do this while also being a fairly intense and challenging game is a singular achievement. I generally try to keep my critiques of games focused on mechanics and gameplay design. Occasionally, like with Metro Exodus, I'll talk about how effective really great graphical fidelity can be at building atmosphere, but I generally don't talk about how a game makes me feel. Probably because most games make me either only satisfied or pissed off, and because emotions are for cowards and crybabies, and acknowledging them represents a fundamental failure of human reason and masculine virility. But in life, I'm a contented person, but not necessarily a happy person. But Deep Rock Galactic somehow just makes me happy to play. Even when it pisses me off in its hard missions, it manages to still make me smile a minute later. The best example of this amazing, joyful charm is the V key. When you're playing in DRG, you can press V to make your dwarf talk. No, there's only like a dozen or so lines, the best of which is clearly this. ROCKIN' STONE, YEAH! But you will find yourself pressing this button probably 20 times an hour, and it never, ever gets old. You press it when you've completed a mission. You press it to say hello. You press it to tell people you're ready. You press it when a new player joins a match. There's something just like endlessly enjoyable about four people pressing the key after narrowly escaping a mission. All four dwarfs put their pickaxe in the air and yell. It's hard to describe, but I've never played a game that leads to such a feeling of friendly camaraderie. Now, that's not to say you won't encounter the occasional douche. You will. In my nearly 70 hours so far, I've had two people be assholes to other players, but the game is so cute, and the gameplay so perfectly balanced between challenging and fun that you'll find yourself constantly pressing the rocking stone button while giggling. And that extends to almost everything else in the game. There's something about the way the dwarfs are animated that just brings a smile to your face. Their walking animation is this adorable little waddle. The dancing is hilarious. The voice who gives you your missions is just funny. Even the ship that you go to between missions is just such a joy to be in. It's filled with absurd little secrets like the achievement for kicking every barrel into the launch tube, or the one for kicking a barrel through the flaming hoop, or the ones you get for throwing other things into the flaming hoop. And this is from a game that also has moments of intense combat, nail-biting tension, and often a really spooky dark aesthetic in many of its levels and maps. We're going to talk right now about the meat and potatoes of the game mechanically and why it manages to be both surprisingly challenging and endearingly casual. But when it comes right down to it, this charm and humor is so rare and so endearing that the game just has a special something that's almost completely unique. It just feels fun and makes you happy through clever design and an almost magical verve that's really quite rare. There's just simply nothing else like it. It'll make you say rocking stone out loud at your desk. It's clearly been made by people who just love making this game and it shines through in almost everything the game does. Casually complex. So I enjoy a wide variety of games, but as a hardcore gamer TM, I generally mostly enjoy skill-based, complex games with deep progression systems. So it's actually a bit surprising that I enjoyed Deep Rock as much as I did considering its very, very light progression system. Deep Rock Galactic has a great core gameplay loop that is simple and repetitive. The game can be played entirely solo and it's actually quite fun that way, but it really shines and co-op. And the fact that the game can take such a simple gameplay loop, combine it with very limited class differences and make something so balanced and replayable, it's a testament to its careful and hyper-focused design. Each of Deep Rock's four classes can complete most missions on most maps solo. And even in co-op, the easier missions can be pretty easily completed with any team composition. But on the harder difficulties, the brilliance of the class balance really shines through. Each class has a specific ability that is crucially important to efficiently completing missions. Every mission's map is procedurally generated, making complex and winding caves in different biomes that require the use of every team member's movements, combat, and support abilities to succeed. The mines are filled with hordes of enemies and the maps themselves are stuffed with dangerous drops, difficult to navigate dark tunnels, and extremely dangerous environmental hazards. And the ores and materials can spawn hanging from ceilings or walls or deep under a tunnel. None of the classes has a full toolkit. The gunner can shoot a long-range zipline to traverse long sections of the map. The engineer can shoot platforms on walls. The driller can make new tunnels to save time, and the scout can light caves up or quickly zip to any height. Individually, these are very niche abilities that can help but are not hugely important. But used together, they perfectly complement each other, creating really fantastic teamplay. Nothing can be accomplished without any of the classes, but everything is easier and more efficient with the right class filling their role correctly. Each of the classes has two choices for both their primary and secondary weapon, which is unlocked through the game's assignment missions. On top of those choices, each item in your loadout has progression to unlock some personalization as well as class perks. None, and I mean none of these perks, on either your class or your toolkit, are significant increases in power. They're all often very slight changes that you can move around depending on the mission type or just to change things up for variety. In this way, the progression is really more of something for players to unlock for the sake of it. It's just another goal to chase along with the wonderful cosmetics. In the end game, there are overclocks which are more powerful customization perks that come with two positive and one negative, but even there, these are only slight upgrades. I will admit that I found this somewhat disappointing at first. I had been hoping for a consistent and significant power climb in the game's progression because that's just what I've come to expect in online co-op games. But it doesn't take long to fully get that power progression isn't the point of the system. It's clear the progression wasn't designed to be something that players chased to get more powerful, but rather something you chased just because it's a little goal on the side of the core gameplay. The game is the game in Deep Rock. You're playing to play, not to unlock more DPS. This even extends to how you unlock these things and the assignments themselves. One of my least favorite things that games tend to do is to tie progression or quests to stupid, specific gameplay goals. Destiny 2's exotic quests are like classic examples of this. Things like get 100 SMG kills while airborne or get grenade launcher kills in Crucible. These kind of quests are directly opposed to the cooperative focus of the game. Suddenly, you're not trying to win a match or beat a boss, instead you're running around like an idiot with three grenade launchers blowing yourself up to get grenade launcher kills, or you're crouching around a corner with a sword held trying to get melee kills. It's dreadful design because it forces the player into behavior that actively hurts his teammates. Deep Rock is fully committed to its co-op focus. The progression is light and ancillary and you can accomplish everything by simply playing the game naturally. It puts the entire focus on just playing the missions to the best of your ability. The reason games don't do this I guess is because I think it's too simple, but Deep Rock is content to just give you solid mechanics and trust that you're playing the game because you like it. There's no progression required to advance. Knowledge of the game is how you progress to the harder missions, not power progression. And frankly, the term advance doesn't even really work. It's just a game you play rather than one you advance through. Now, I like games with power progression of course, but it's also really refreshing to play such a streamlined game that is laser focused on doing what it does well. This is a game that doesn't have a ton of systems. You won't spend any time looking at how to make the best possible builds. It is an endlessly replayable live service game that keeps you playing not by dangling unlocks, but by simply being a joy to play. Now, as a little update hilariously, as I went to record the audio for this video today, I logged in and saw a huge overhaul to both your ship and the progression. Everything I've said still stands as the character perks still aren't massively powerful upgrades to chase. They are, however, now much cooler and better implemented. The new system allows the player three passive and two active perks, including a double jump and other things like the reduced fall damage perk is now an active ability you have to use. So while the progression is still simple and doesn't require a bunch of build crafting, it is in fact gameplay changing enough to really alter how you play a map and the perks themselves are really well thought out so that you'll want to use different perks for different missions for sure. It's pretty excellent, actually, and walks a really fine balance of not being necessary but being cool enough that you definitely want to engage with the system. So let's quickly get to the actual gameplay. Deep Rock Galactic is a completely unique and amazingly clever mix of first person shooter, map exploration, and resource gathering. Each of those core pillars of the game are as well designed and fun as the other ones. One of the most important skills that you will develop is the ability to just effectively and efficiently navigate the map. That seems like a very simple thing that could easily be the kind of boring shit that pisses me off, but in Deep Rock Galactic, actually using the map and synergizing the tools of your team to explore and exploit the level requires skill and game knowledge. Just the exploration and mining aspect is deeply satisfying on its own, and on harder missions there are a ton of different modifiers that make that part of the game challenging and engaging and often frustrating in the good way. And I just can't stress enough that simply mining and exploring on its own is fun. But then the game puts the player under constant pressure by also being a pretty excellent shooter. The gunplay here is surprisingly great with each class feeling completely different and filling a different combat role. Movement feels good and combined with using each class's traversal tools, the combat is surprisingly creative and hectic. DRG keeps you on your toes and its combat ties right back into exploration. As in order to get more ammunition, you need to find and mine a specific mineral called Nitra. There aren't a ton of enemies, but all of the enemies fill very specific roles that require very specific responses from the player. As in FPS, Deep Rock is extremely solid. It hits all of the important notes that a good shooter has to nail. Games feel weighty and powerful and sound great. Players need to be hyper, super-duper aware of their surroundings and target prioritization is the difference between success and failure. The game's difficulty levels all feel good to play and the two highest mission difficulties are extremely challenging. Deep Rock Galactic works so well it's easy to miss just how new and different its mix actually is. There is nothing else really like it. Usually when you get these kind of genre blending games, one side or the other generally suffers for it. I mean, take most open-world survival games and you'll notice that the combat is generally garbage. Or, a game like Generation Zero, which I actually like quite a bit. It has great combat but with really shallow and hollow crafting and survival elements. It's often the case that genre blending games will have missions that feel tacked on solely for the purpose of setting it apart from other shooters. Deep Rock is two extremely polished, focused, balanced and well-designed games perfectly blended into something totally new and fresh. It is amazing. Finally, I want to end by touching on how this mix of mechanics and features creates an overall game that is very rare type in these days. The vast majority of ongoing live service games require nearly full-time commitments from a player. It's really not possible to play Destiny 2 and Warframe, or Warframe and the Division 2. These games succeed because they become THE game that players play. They require significant time investments and becoming proficient requires digging deep into the gear or player progression. Those types of games all have huge amounts of content and almost all of that content revolves around rewarding the player for their time investment with player power or prestige or both. You can drop in and play Destiny 2 for sure, but even though its gameplay is insanely refined and polished, its systems are all set up to draw you in and set long-term goals in front of you. Simply playing an hour a week isn't going to do all that much for you because the grind and progression requires much more time investment. Deep Rock Galactic demands a good amount of skill and game knowledge to play it well, but its progression and goals are all low stress and focused on casual progression, which makes it perhaps the very perfect online co-op game for people who aren't interested in getting involved in the intense time commitment that most modern live service games demand. In periods like this I often find myself staring at my gog or steam page wondering what to install and play. Deep Rock Galactic is the perfect game for people who want a low pressure online co-op game. Almost all of what you unlock is nice, but not crucial, gear upgrades. And then there's just a huge long-term goal of super fun cosmetic upgrades. And the gameplay itself combines easily graspable familiarity with endless shades of variety. It fills a hugely important role for me now, it's the game that I've started to play when I've got an hour and just feel like playing something that's fun. Deep Rock is the first game by a very small studio and the amount of love and care that's been put into it is immediately apparent. It is not perfect for sure. The harder missions can be somewhat unfairly punishing if you get unlucky with the area generation. And the game does a pretty poor job of onboarding the player. It takes a couple of hours and some googling to actually figure out what the hell is going on. But as far as online games go, it is the simplest to understand and lowest stress one I have ever come across. It is incredibly smartly designed and it has resisted the temptation to become overly grindy. It's well aware that its appeal is simply in its fantastic gameplay and it's incredibly endearing world in art design. And on top of all that, it is the most joyful execution of an online co-op game I've ever come across. There's so little on the internet about ghost ship games that the only really informative things I came across were an AMA they did on Reddit a couple years ago. But I'm going to link that down below and say that if you aren't sure about getting this, go check that out. Because just reading it shows how much the people who've made this love what they're doing and it also shows how thoughtful they've been about their progression in gameplay systems. Check out that AMA for sure because that singular focus shines through in every system and art asset in the game. If you're looking for something that just lets you pop in and play whenever you're bored but still be working towards unlocking a huge list of things in a wonderfully intense and challenging yet still amazingly low stress and casual environment Deep Rock Galactic is the game for you. And that is the true triumph of the game. The fact that that sentence works. Deep Rock Galactic is an intense, challenging, mechanically deep online game that is fun, low stress and casual. I don't think that sentence is true for any other game ever made. And that alone makes it worth more than its asking price. All right, I'll see you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.