14 hours Ago By RPS
If you’re the naughty sort, legend has it that on Christmas Eve a portly bearded chap will descend down your chimney and leave behind a lump of coal. The dwarven heroes of today’s game are much the same, except instead of using the chimney they will deploy pickaxes and power tools to burrow straight through your living room wall, and will make off with any minerals in the house rather than leaving them behind in a sock. It's Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor ! James: I wouldn’t blame anyone for being suspicious of Vampire Survivors -likes.
Much like how the AAA industry tried to crowbar all their franchises into ropey battle royale modes a few years back, the success of VampSurvs has blinded an awful lot of eyes with glaring green dollar signs, leading in turn to enough shovelled-out autoshooters to clog up at least two Steam Next Fests. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor feels different, and I promise not just because it’s spun off from a co-op FPS I really like. But it is clever with how it borrows chunks of OG DRG to make a Survivors-like that’s genuinely fresh and distinct, presented with enough polish to make you forget it’s still in the wilds of early access.
Probably the best example of this is the mining. In DRG you can pickaxe and drill open the terrain to open new pathways or sculpt a cave to make it more easily defensible. DRG: Survivor, rather than plopping you on a completely flat, infinitely scrolling arena, surrounds you with rock walls and offers you the same opportunity.
Need to juke a heavy horde? Bash a hole through the barrier and slip through to safety. Building for close-range damage? Cut a new tunnel and bait the bugs into your bespoke chokepoint. These caves aren’t just levels, they’re slabs of clay to reshape to your advantage – a whole new tactical consideration on top of dodging and shooting.
Digging, however, takes time, as does plucking valuable minerals – your currency for both permanent and run-specific upgrades – from the rock. This invites your insectoid foes, who can otherwise be outran in all but their fattest swarms, to close the gap, but then that may be worth it if you can just grab that last shining chunk of gold..
. Moments like this, where you’re forced to choose between stopping to mine and potentially losing bits of dwarf bum to the encroaching crowd of mandibles, are a regular feature of DRG: Survivor. More importantly they bring a stakes-raising, leaning-forward-in-your-chair thrill that even the genre’s originator doesn’t deliver in such generous doses.
At least not as soon as a run begins, anyway. Vampire Survivors can be more fun in the late game, when you’ve amassed enough random magic bullshit to delete whole screens of monsters at once; you’re rarely that powerful here. But by more closely walking the line between victory and death, and by balancing your mining tools with the risk of stopping to use them, DRG: Survivor adds a compelling tension to its autoshooting, in a way that precious few of its contemporaries could even hope to attempt.
Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!.
