Deep Rock Galactic Is Seriously Great (Review) - English (1)

 this video is brought to you by Skillshare okay so this is a true story I met the dev team for deep rock galactic when I was at e3 2017 who was standing in the queue to go into the Xbox press conference and we started chatting and they said oh yeah we're about to reveal our game during the show and I'm like huh that's kind of a big deal right and they're like yeah I guess it is that's a true story there were six people back then working on the game and since that time their studio has grown to some twenty people and they've just released their game into version 1.0 last week after being in early access for years I have never once played this game in fact other than what I saw in that showcase I've never even seen the game the only thing I knew about deep Broca lactic is that it had dwarves in it and it was universally beloved this game has a 96% positive rating on Steam making it the 93rd highest rated game on the platform steam has over 30,000 games so that puts deep rock in the top 0.003 1% of games on Steam that's not too bad so last week I bought it I booted it up and I've dropped about 40 hours into it did it live up to the hype yeah I'd say it did

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deep rock Galactic is an incredibly simple game to explain you play as one of four classes of minor each with their own weapons and utility tools and you have to mine stuff gold alien eggs weird red crystal stuff then you drop it into a minecart and then you go home that's it that's the game that's the review ten out of ten deep rock is a co-op shooter in the traditional left4dead sense where the focus isn't on min max builds or complex progression paths or long tail live service monetization it's just about having fun with your friends it isn't about precise tactical balanced gameplay it's about having adventures actually yes that's it that's exactly what deep rock galactic is it's an adventure simulator you like those dwarves from The Hobbit and you're going to the misty mountain to score some gold and along the way you'll drink and be merry and get lost and fall down and your friends will help you get up and you'll fight hard and you'll work together and in the end you'll bring back a mighty hall and you'll drink some more that's deep rock galactic and I think that's why people love it so much but let's not gloss over its accomplishments getting to the point where you can create this experience for players isn't easy and the dev team have shown tremendous insight and vision with the choices they've made by far and away the most impressive aspect of deep rock galactic other spaces you'll be exploring deep rocks levels are all procedurally generated no-shoe cabins are alike in fact no to caverns are even close to being alike games like warframe or Diablo use tile sets and combine them together in different ways which means that ya know two levels are the same but they always kind of feel the same deep rocks levels never ever ever feel the same like they just don't even come close to the same in 40 hours I've never once had that moment of like oh yeah I think I've seen this before you could have one level that's a gigantic windy snake-like foreverness the next could be biomes of different shapes and sizes connected by short or long stretches the nest could be a singular massive cavern that would take you 2 to 3 minutes to walk the circumference off and all of these different possibilities can be combined with one another I remember I was walking through a regular level with some typical biomes a few connecting tunnels it was all unique but it wasn't stand out versus everything else I'd seen to that point and then came to the spot this cavern was like the hall of the Mountain King this thing was so large that I couldn't see the top and so wide that I couldn't see all sides at once it was just so profoundly or inspiringly massive and you walk through it and you're like whoa and then you remember that all of this is procedurally generated and you're like whoa and then you realize that your system is still maintaining an absolutely rock-solid frame rate despite the fact that the internal space just multiplied by a factor of 50 and you're like how deep rocks procedural generation is a technological marvel that feeds the sense of exploration and adventure that is core to this game every time I shoved off from my castle on the sky I had a genuine sense of excitement about what I'd find below I was excited to stumble upon the dirt patches which are the dividers between the biomes and as I chipped away at them I'd think oh I wonder what's on the other side of this one and as I tossed my flare out to see id madly - to follow it practically tripping over myself to see what lay in store for me next I'm not exaggerating I really did feel this way earlier this year I played subnautica for the first time the sense of discovery in that game it stays with you you don't forget how you felt the first time you discovered a new biome but at the end of the day subnautica is static and finite and it ends deep rocks sense of discovery isn't quite as striking as that but the flipside is that it doesn't end it just keeps coming at you as you dive deeper and deeper but I don't want to create the impression the deep rock is just this zen-like exploratory experience I mean it's also kind of like this

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deep rock Galactic is a co-op shooter that's mostly about having good times with your friends the game can be played single-player absolutely flawlessly in fact there's a little a to bots who accompanies you when you're solo and they'll help you mind things and shoot stuff it works surprisingly well so yeah you can have a really good time playing this game solo but you can have like 20 times more fun if you play with other people most of this relates to class design there are 4 classes in the game and each bring unique utility to a dig there's a gunner who brings a lot of firepower as well as a zipline launcher allowing you and your team to cross huge spaces as the crow flies there's the scout who can grapple quickly across cabins and light them up making it easier to see there's the engineer who can build platforms for people to stand on as well as defensive turrets and finally there's the driller who can yeah he can even drill things the first thing you need to know about deep rock is that absolutely everything is destructible there isn't a single square inch of the map that you can't take apart with your pickaxe that gives the developers a huge amount of freedom with their procedural generation algorithm because they can put my novel material pretty much anywhere they want even at the highest point in the center of a huge cavern at the end of the day you can just dig a hole through the ceiling to get there there is nowhere you cannot eventually reach or fall from the best part about working as a team is that you don't need to dig all these unnecessary holes you can have your gonna build a zipline across a chasm your engineer build a platform on a wall your Scout grapple up to it or you could just have your driller do some demolition work working together to overcome these traversal challenges is one of the most satisfying parts of deep rock and the good news is that you can enjoy this stuff even if you don't have friends to play with because the matchmaking and communication options are second to none firstly you've got a full list of missions you can select from and you can host either public or private digs if it's public someone will eventually join you I've started dozens of solo digs and I've never once finished a dig so low because people always drop in during a mission to help me complete it these people are joining my digs through the server browser where they can filter based on mission type or difficulty or server proximity so they can make sure they have a good strong connection they can see which classes are already on the dig so they can select a class that complements the team and in seconds they're being dropped in the loading times in this game by the way oh my god I don't understand how they did this this is how long it takes to get into a mission in deep rock given the size of some of these levels the fact that they load this quickly is pretty wild when you're in the mission deep rock has a rather brilliant contextual pinging system you can tell your teammates that you've located a specific mineral you can request platforms highlight enemies to be killed or just yell out for them to follow you there's voice comms built-in but you really don't need to talk to get the job done the ping system is more than enough one of the things that I appreciate most about deep rock is how effortless its cooperation feels as soon as you drop in you'll immediately start working together even if you're completely new to the game you'll still find some way to help out your team it's almost instinctive because of how well the game has been designed and with the community as wholesome and positive and supportive as deep rocks this collaboration hits you right in the fields I've played solo my whole way through and I've met dozens of really nice really chatty people who provided both helpful advice and good vanta deeper ops community is a definite highlight so there's one part of deep rock that I don't love and oddly enough it's the combat but it's not that big a deal forme so let me explain why combat represents about 30% of the deep rock experience 70% of the time you'll just be exploring caves mining staff falling to your death the usual but 30% of the time you'll be shooting enemies some of this will happen while you're mining so just a small collection of enemies will come and hassle you mostly it will be at specific points in the mission where mission control alerts you that a swarm is incoming in these moments you have to group up with your squad and take down five or six thick waves of enemies there's also a lots thrown at you towards the end of a mission when you're trying to make your escape each class has two weapons a primary and a secondary as well as a grenade weapon handling gun design etc it's all fine it's definitely not standout it doesn't feel particularly great to fire these weapons but nor does it feel bad it just works the big issues I think are enemy design enemy variety and audio design firstly enemies are a little bit annoying to fight the standard ant type enemy is fine but the little versions of those just sort of too little and they kind of scurry around your feet like pretty much every enemy in fallout 76 the big ones take reduced damage from the front so you need to move around behind them to damage them the flying enemies can pick you up and drop you from pretty much anywhere and unless you have a very specific per to stop this from happening there is nothing you can do when this happens I mean watch this these frustrations are compounded by how few enemy types there are you're really fighting the same two to three enemy types about 80% of the time the other two or three enemy variants are pretty rare meaning that combat starts to feel rather repetitive in a way that the exploration and mining never does the worst part though is the audio design oh my god okay so every enemy in the game can crawl on walls which means they can come from any direction at any time what this means is that you'll be exploring or digging or whatever when all of a sudden this happens so in these clips I had no idea that these enemies were anywhere near me until they started hitting me and then it's this frantic process of looking around for where I'm being hit from because they can hit me from literally any direction this all could have been avoided if the enemies had proper audio cues to alert the player there are some audio cues here absolutely but they're really really  inconsistent a lot of the time when you're playing deep rock you won't know that an enemy is near you until you get hit by that enemy and that really starts to piss you off now I don't want to paint too negative view of the combat though I've had plenty of moments where I did enjoy combat particularly when the team worked together to make the most of their unique class kits I loved it when a swarm was called and the Scout would like to throw out his flare to light up the whole cavern I loved helping the engineer build his turrets in preparation for an assault here our driller carved out a spot around this point that we had to defend making it way way easier for us to hold our ground the gunner can put zip lines above these positions so you can be suspended in midair out of reach of the enemies while you're raining down fire in these moments deep rock feels like aliens when the squad goes into that power reactor and build Paxson's like they're coming out of the walls matters it feels really good but for me these moments where absolutely everything is clicking perfectly a rare and I'm just left feeling a little bit mad the combat to be honest though that doesn't really faze me in the slightest because of how I choose to play there are five difficulties on offer here and I play at the second or third lowest difficulty most of the time I do this not because the game is hard but because I don't play the game for the combat and the combat happens way less at these lower difficulty tiers so I just go through those brief combat sections quickly and I have an absolute blast doing everything else a lot of people will say that deep rock is a co-op shooter and yes totally it definitely falls into that category is a co-op shooter but I prefer to refer to it as a co-op exploration game a co-op mining game a co-op adventure game the shooting is I think the least impressive part of what is a spectacularly impressive package you probably have some more specific questions about the overall structure and flow of deep rock so let's answer those now one of the most striking features of the game is just how open and accessible its parts are as soon as you arrive in your space station you'll get given an assignment which is just a requirement to complete a certain set of missions you'll complete them you'll come back you'll repeat the process eight or nine times and then pretty much the whole game in open to you you can go wherever you like on the map and load up any mission you like as you level up your class will unlock customization options for your weapons and armor later on you'll unlock a higher difficulty tier as well as weekly missions called deep dives which award in-game currencies used for weapon customization but yeah it's not like you play this game and you need to work for 20 or 30 hours to get to the good stuff what you do in our one is basically the exact same thing that you do at hour 30 or at hour 300 the game isn't interested in dragging out the player experience through bottleneck progression gateways it's just like here it is play almost any part of it you want go have fun as I played through deep rock galactic I got a sense that this is what live service games could have been like if developers hadn't completely ruined that concept this is a game that is meant to be played for a really long amount of time but not because you're led by the nose with artificially inflated difficulty or progression gating or FOMO but because you want to play it because it's fun to play it it has a progression structure that is so easily monetizable but it's all free there are two DLC cosmetics packs but there are tiny tiny sliver of the total pool of cosmetics the rest of which are free to work deep rock galactic feels like a live service game if the developer actually delivered all of the promised content on day one and then they forgot to monetize it honestly it feels like a sliding doors moment for video games like peering into a parallel universe where this is how things could have been if greedy publishers had used the live service model for good instead of evil I just want to be really clear though that this open slather buffet style content approach won't work for everyone a lot of people really crave a structured form of progression that gives them something to work towards they really value big meaty achievement milestones deep rock certainly has these but they aren't the focus of the game I've seen plenty of people say I really liked deep rock but then I quickly got bored of it and I can understand that because as I've said how will one an hour 300 are essentially the same to me deep rock is the perfect game to play while you're watching Rick and Morty episodes on your second monitor it's perfect to play if you have some mate server voice chat and you're just chatting away it's perfect to play if you just want to relax and mindlessly kill some time deep rock has an almost retro feel to it because it's a video game that's just designed to be played it's not tense PvP battles or raid bosses with endless health or exhausting progression paths and you slowly grind through it's just a good old fashioned video game to be played for the sheer fun of it and in 2021 I am more than okay with that

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I want to finish by talking about the greatest movie in the history of cinema you all know the one I'm talking about of course that's right Armageddon science is confirmed on multiple occasions that this is the only perfect film in existence so it has much to teach us as we continue to unravel its genius Armageddon is the story of a group of miners who gets shot out of a rocket to do some mining on a hostile alien environment deep rock Galactic is of course the video game adaptation of Armageddon except they had to replace Bruce Willis Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi with dwarves due to licensing restraints like Armageddon deep rockGalactic isn't about the mission it's about the characters I'm not joking when I say this I love these dwarves they're the best they are goddamn heroes everyone I want to have beers with these blokes in real life and the knowledge that I can't makes me sad deep rock Galactic's most impressive technical feature is its procedural generation but its most impressive feature overall it's just how much personality and charm is bursting from every inch of it from the space station which somehow feels both technologically advanced and lo-fi homely it's the ability to go drinking at the bar withyour mates and Cheers one another and dancing are the dancing it's the fact that when you hit that a Moute button you're yelling rock and stone with such excitement and fervor that it's infectious I guarantee you that when you play this game you will be in the shower yelling rock and stone because it just feels good like there was this one instance where we discovered this compressed mineral and at that point everyone just stopped what they were doing just to celebrate like just swatch this was the game at that point this was the most important thing we could be doing just standing around celebrating that's deep rock Galactic it's this positivity it's this fun it's this excitement it's just this just this yelling rock and Stone Feeny just can't help but be swept up in that's the game it's not the shooting it's the emotive and it's very good and you should totally buy it and play it in I hope you love

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