The day has finally come. The Deep Rock Galactic spin-off, known as Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, has officially launched into 1.0. This marks the end of the game’s early access period after only about two years. Despite Deep Rock Galactic Survivor flying a bit under the radar, the game’s 1.0 opening week has managed to rake in over 17k players.
What is Deep Rock Galactic Survivor?
In order to fully understand what Deep Rock Galactic Survivor is, you must be familiar with its original game. In short, DRG is a co-op FPS game about a squad of space Dwarves exploring and mining inside 100% destructible environments, procedurally-generated caves, while fighting endless hordes of alien monsters.
DRG Survivor takes the characters, foundations, and themings of the original game and transforms it into a single-player survivor-like auto-shooter, akin to Vampire Survivors. Take on hordes of lethal aliens, mine riches, and unlock powerful upgrades to survive in this new action Roguelike bullet hell.
DRG Survivor has also seen its player base spike once again. Currently marking this as one of the most popular months in the game’s history, with the recent player count hitting about 17k players according to SteamDB.
Rock & Stone, It Never Gets Old
Despite both games being in completely different genres, the heart and soul have been perfectly encapsulated and transferred to Survivor. But what sets the games apart? Firstly, whereas regular DRG has its standard endgame, Survivor’s endgame comes primarily through its Rougelike randomness and the new Gear system.
To ensure Survivor has depth and long-term progression, Survivor’s true endgame is in its Gear system, which allows its players to mix and match different items for tons of theorycrafting. Each item provides passive bonuses similar to meta upgrades found in matches. There are six main types:
- Armor for defense
- Weapon Mods for combat stats
- Canisters to alter weapon effects
- Gadgets for mining and collection efficiency
- Tools for reload and range
- Chips that grant unique upgrades to Bosco
Gear comes in four rarities from Uncommon to Legendary, with higher rarities offering more stats and sometimes multiple quirks. Rarity odds also improve as your Player Rank increases, while gear level scales with progression milestones such as completing your first Hazard 2 dive.
Gear can drop randomly during missions, with bosses guaranteeing a piece, and can be accessed and equipped between missions through the gear menu.
1.0 and the Future
Along with the brand new Gear system, DRG Survivor also introduces a new game mode, Escort Duty. This new mission tasks you with escorting B0b-33, the Drilldozer, a machine built to smash through rock, swarms of bugs, and minerals until it gets to the coveted Ommaran Heartstone. This mission unfolds similarly to the Escort mission in normal DRG.
Along with the addition of a new mission, there’s also a brand new Mission Roadmap. Each mission type (Elimination and Escort Duty) now has a separate track of five sectors, with gates marking key milestones in your journey. Advancing requires clearing enough mission goals to unlock a sector gate, a special dive on the next hazard level. Beating a gate opens up the next sector.
Advancing into the next sector increases the difficulty, with more demanding objectives and added modifiers that make each dive feel special, challenging, and rewarding to progress through.
Thankfully, this isn’t the end for DRG Survivor. The developers have assured the fans that 1.0 is not the end of the journey. So there has never been a better time to grab Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Don’t miss out on the 30% sale on Steam while it still lasts.
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