Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (2025)

Having a good, long stint with the original DRG, I openly follow the franchise as it's branching out into two spin-offs: Survivor and Rogue Core. The former came out of early access stage back in September, so I get to feel it out in its confidently complete form.

So, yes, it definitely plays out as a auto-shooter survivor game, with objectives to achieve for mission completion to unlock classes, upgrades and features to strengthen your miner long term-wise. Short term-wise, experience points grants you some choices out of a wide array of buffs and weapons to help you through constant swarms of alien bugs, in hope that you'll reach your next goal.

Deep Rock Galactic fans will find plenty of signature marks from the original DRG, including designs and sounds that have transferred over. But your commitment to the game's progress will depend on how much of a fan you are of the repetitive gameplay loop. For here, I could get absorbed into the engaging action and upgrades that continually feed onto my dopamine receptors, yet I feel that I have seen pretty much the core content after trying it all out: The classes, the mission types and majority of weapons offered the first few hours. There's not much that would keep me hooked further up, unless I want to pass some fun time as the badass space dwarf enjoying the swarm slaughter while carrying out missions. Nothing wrong with that, I'll probably just come back if I feel bored during a day.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors is easily one of the best bullet heaven titles out there – which is no small feat, considering the amount of competition there is nowadays. Excellent visuals, lovely gameplay, with the unique mining mechanics that add a lot of depth to the runs. There’s a ton of content to grind towards, with even 300 unique achievements at launch, making this title a strong candidate to stay installed on your SSD for quite some time.

A bit of a shame perhaps that it lacks any sort of co-op, since that’s a huge part of the original Deep Rock Galactic experience. Even so, this is one of the finest bullet heaven games out there right now, and with it launching on Game Pass, you have no excuses not to dig into the deep dungeons of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors.

Cool new addition to Game Pass! It's a "Spaghetti Pac-Man", as I have termed them -- it's basically an adaptation of the Vampire Survivors formula, where like Pac-Man the only input is movement, and the "maze" is crafted by both the level design and the movements of the masses of enemies themselves.

I like the diversions from the Vampire Survivors formula like the "mining" component, which really brings everything back into that Deep Rock Galactic feel. It's fun to funnel the enemies through chokepoints you create in the mineable rocks.