Deep Rock Galactic is a game where you are a space dwarf who must descend below the surface of Hoxxes IV to mine morkite while fending off swarms of space bugs. It’s a 4-player multiplayer shooter with the defining gameplay mechanic being 3D traversal. You can mine out almost any wall like it’s Minecraft except slower and the grid is way less obvious and blocky, and each of the four classes of dwarf miner have various tricks to help make getting around the caves easier: The driller can mine through walls very quickly, the engineer can place new platforms, the scout has a grappling hook that basically lets him fly, and the gunner technically has a zipline but for the most part that is the all-in-on-combat class. Any class can dig through walls at the default glacial pace and sometimes it’s even beneficial to cut a tunnel directly between two important locations if the natural caves connecting them are circuitous and long but the distance between the two chambers is fairly short.
So you and up to three others get dropped into a natural cave system, told to find and mine a certain quota of morkite (or given some other objective related to morkite mining, like finding and salvaging destroyed mining equipment or hooking up a refinery to some extractors to process liquid morkite, or whatever), and if you succeed you get money and other resources to buy upgrades with. To the extent that the game has a main plot, it’s that it has “assignments,” a series of connected missions, but the individual missions aren’t specific missions with some kind of voice acted cut scenes connecting them, but rather certain types of missions. The first mission of the first assignment, for example, is to complete a standard morkite-harvesting mission. The second one is to complete an alien egg hunt mission. The third is to complete an on-site refinery mission. No special voice acting or plot beats, just a checklist of mission types that the game unlocks for you one by one to introduce you to the game.
There’s a progression from here to several assignments that unlock new weapons for your chosen class (you can switch classes at any time, but your level resets, so if your goal is to reach the end of the game, such that it is, you’re better off picking one and sticking to it), and once you max out your level on a class (which does not require unlocking all the new gear, but you may as well), you do a special promotion assignment, and once you’ve done that you can do an assignment for “breaching the core” which rewards you with a special matrix core that can be used to unlock endgame cosmetics. You can then grind that indefinitely to unlock more cosmetics. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic structure. It’s the framework of an MMORPG (albeit with the importance of leveling de-emphasized, as leveling up does not make you more powerful, only unlocks weapon options that make you more flexible but no stronger) with basically no story. It’s got great atmosphere and vibes, there’s tons of personality in the miners and mission control, but for some reason they never bring it together into an actual plot.
But Deep Rock Galactic has an ace up its sleeve: A single round of the game is, I would estimate, 10-15 minutes long. This is pretty perfect for breaking up chunks of work, and since each mission is individually fun, I’ll probably end up playing a lot of it.
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