Action · 2020 · Ghost Ship Games · online
Deep Rock Galactic
Down into dark caves as dwarves: dig, shoot, drink beer, get out again.
What it is about
You are dwarves working for a mining corporation. A pod drops you into a cave, you complete an assignment — extract ore, steal eggs, repair a machine — and call the pod back at the end. Everything in between is up to you.
The caves are generated fresh every time and fully destructible: where there is no path, you dig one. That is exactly where the four roles start to interlock — the Driller makes shortcuts, the Engineer builds platforms, the Scout fires flares at the ceiling, the Gunner strings ziplines.
Every so often a swarm arrives. The quiet digging turns into a firefight in narrow tunnels, and afterwards you go back to digging as if nothing happened.
Our verdict for couples
Four dwarves, one cave, and nobody gets back out unless somebody else has strung a rope. The work divides itself as you play: one digs through to the ore, one keeps the wall clear, and afterwards each is convinced they had the harder job. Because you pick the difficulty freely before every mission, you can agree on a level instead of the more practised one dragging the other along. A mission takes a good half hour, which makes it one of the few games that still fits into a Tuesday.
Pros
- Five difficulty levels, freely chosen
- Four roles that need each other
- One mission fits half an evening
Cons
- No local co-op
- First-person view as an entry hurdle
- New content arrives rarely
Suitable from
Hobby
- Conflict potential
- Harmonious
- Cosiness
- Mixed
- When you can stop
- After 30–45 minutes
- How long it lasts
- No ending
What other co-op fans say
One sentence recurs across the community in every variation: solo works, together it is a different game. What gets praised most is how easily the four classes complement each other and how good-natured the community around it is — from five difficulty settings to strangers who simply take you along. The tone stands out: plenty of people are still enthusiastic after several hundred hours. The criticism comes almost entirely from one direction, and it is not about the game itself but its upkeep — that the studio turned to spin-offs, that new content dried up, and that the servers sometimes play up.
- “The only condition is that you absolutely have to play it in co-op, because playing it solo is a total drag.”
- “Super easy to get immersed or to just mess around with friends.”
- “Too bad devs almost abandoned it for a questionable roguelike spinoff.”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
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