Rock

Deep Rock Galactic celebrated its 5-year anniversary in May 2025. Below, we look at how it has maintained its identity as one of the best co-op shooters around.

Before any round of Deep Rock Galactic, my friends and I have a little ritual. We’ll pile into the bar at HQ and order a drink. Sometimes, it’ll be Deep Rock’s equivalent of a seasonal draft–complete with buffs that’ll carry over into the next few expeditions–but other times it’s just a brew with a silly effect, like a drink that’ll freeze the player or shrink them. We’ll hoist our mugs into the air, shout, “Rock and stone,” and then chug our virtual ale of choice. Shortly thereafter, one of us moseys over to the jukebox and drops a coin in. Before I know it, one of us is twirling like a ballerina while the other twerks adjacent to them. Someone else is doing the robot or some move reminiscent of Gangnam Style. Everything’s alright.

For this reason, and countless others, I feel it’s about time we talk about Deep Rock Galactic in the same vein as the greats. Since it’s 1.0 launch five years ago, the cooperative shooter has proven time and time again that it is more than just another novel (yet niche) take on the formula once perfected by titles like Left 4 Dead. It has instead carved out a unique and approachable vision of what this kind of game can be, filling titanic shoes and all the while paving a brighter and more inclusive road forward. That’s especially difficult given the obnoxiously dark tunnels under Hoxxes IV in which Deep Rock Galactic takes place. But by sticking to its guns and never kowtowing to the pressure of chasing trends like countless other live-service titles around it, Deep Rock Galactic has succeeded where many have failed, and stands to continue longer than many of its contemporaries.

Between best-in-class squad-based gameplay with clear and distinct roles, procedural-generation tools and mission types that freshen every run, an appealing low-poly art style, a user-friendly approach to seasonal content, a focus on irreverence, and a community driven by kindness, there’s very little that Deep Rock Galactic doesn’t knock out of the park.

Rock and stone

Deep Rock Galactic is a four-player cooperative shooter that tasks players with plumbing the depths of a hostile planet, Hoxxes IV, in search of materials to bring back to their parent company, the eponymous Deep Rock Galactic corporation. You are a squad of four blue-collar dwarves–complete with rad sci-fi equipment, pickaxes, a penchant for booze, and plump beards–working under the company on increasingly convoluted and dangerous jobs. Get in, get the job done, get the hell out of Dodge; that’s the gig.

To describe it as some of the most fun I’ve had in a game is still doing it a disservice.

Every run of Deep Rock Galactic is a deliriously fun romp. Across Hoxxes IV’s varied environs, which range from sand-blasted caverns and volcanic cores to fae-like crystalline caves and radioactive wastes, a vast range of mission types occupy the time of the dwarves that fill the ranks of the Deep Rock Galactic corporation. Sometimes, you will just have to harvest a certain kind of ore from a certain biome, like some kind of deep-space prospector, and other times, you are tasked with the assassination of monstrous bugs impeding progress. My favorite of these mission types involves building a pipeline to three pumps randomly distributed across the map. You have to lay it down piece by piece and can even grind on the rails of the pipe like you’re some kind of dwarven skater. Once they’re all connected and running, bugs will begin to target and break the pipes, prompting players to divide and conquer to defend the pipeline, all the while riding the pipes like an indoor rollercoaster. All in a day’s work at Deep Rock Galactic.

A gunner repelling an attack in one of Deep Rock Galactic’s biomes.

The varied and numerous jobs, as well as side objectives (like destroying a certain number of bug eggs) and possible encounters, ensure there’s never a dull moment. Sometimes a mission will be going swimmingly until a titanic bug nukes you off the map. You’ll be making your escape and be within feet of victory when an enemy type known to cling to the darkest part of the cavern ceilings extends a tentacle to pluck you off the ground and isolate you from the team. Deep Rock Galactic missions are rarely as simple as they seem on their face, and I always delight in the mischievous ways in which they twist the knife and provide another wrinkle and another story to tell ourselves and others.

To that end, each level–down to its composition and length–is procedurally generated, and for as long as I’ve played Deep Rock Galactic, I’ve rarely, if ever, encountered a level similar to any other, and that’s kept me coming back for years. Over that span of time, the developers at Ghost Ship Games have built upon the game’s foundation, adding modifiers, seasonal events, and additional mission types that have spiced up the diversity of content on offer. After some time away from the game, I recently revisited it and started a mission that culminated in an encounter that I had, miraculously, never done! Partway through another mission, a swarm of bugs covered in rocks appeared, forcing us to use our pickaxes to do damage to them as opposed to traditional weaponry, and this too was a surprising new addition. Since I first picked it up, the game has never lacked depth, but to see how far it’s come after a few years is astounding.

“Teamwork and beer will keep us together”

Once you’ve settled on a mission, you and your party will be dropped onto the planet in pods that burrow deep underground, at which point you’re prompted to pick a class and dig like your life depends on it…because it does. The four classes are composed of the gunner, engineer, scout, and driller. The gunner, as is maybe obvious, is the big damage dealer of the bunch, and comes complete with a good ol’ six shooter, while the engineer supports the others with turrets and placeable platforms that smooth out maneuverability in the game’s often-labyrinthine caverns. The scout is more of a lone wolf who can zip to places on their own with a hookshot, but also touts a flare gun that nails longer-lasting sources of light to walls to improve visibility. And then there’s my personal favorite, the driller, who supports the rest of the team by dual-wielding large drill bits and detonating C4 charges that blow bugs and chunks of earth sky high with similar aplomb.

No one is locked into a role and your party can opt for any permutations of the crew, including all of one class or none of another. Deep Rock Galactic matches are likely best played with all roles equally represented, but tuning the difficulty down (or simply being really experienced with the game) can make up for some absences; otherwise you may as well be playing with an additional handicap. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I could’ve desperately used a driller to reach some out-of-reach goal because I’d gotten lost and separated from the rest of my teammates. I can also recount numerous times a well-placed zipline was the key component in my reckless extraction.

They’re just here for the zipline.

Every class comes with its own set of unlockable weapons and they rarely step over one another in terms of utility. The driller, for example, mostly uses crowd-control weapons like a flamethrower, cryo gun, or sludge pump that can be charged to fire especially huge and debilitating globs of acid. The scout begins with a fairly standard assault rifle, but can eventually get a marksman rifle that can do massive damage with focus shots and their very own boomstick. Each weapon can be fine-tuned to your preferences via a skill tree and customizations, as well as overclocks that fundamentally change their natures.

In fact, just about every facet of the dwarves can be changed to your liking. Multiple seasons and years later, Deep Rock Galactic has a bevy of free customization options. They are unlocked by collecting resources and in-game money, as well as via progression on the season passes, which are all completely free and which you can swap between at any time. Additionally, there’s a wealth of paid customization options that can be picked up too, but these are largely seen as a way to support the team for all of the free content that they manage to squeeze into the game.You can also swap out the pieces of your pickaxe, your helmet, your beard, and just about everything in between them. So yes, if you’ve been picking up on this game’s pseudo-western vibe, you can rock a cowboy hat and live your space-western fantasy. As if that weren’t enough, there are challenges that net players upgrade points that can be spent on active and passive perks, which can be slotted into loadouts, further diversifying the possibilities, and endgame activities such as Deep Dives offer rewarding paths of progression for folks looking to make these characters into full-fledged avatars of themselves.

In brief, there’s no shortage of things to do or unlock in Deep Rock Galactic, and while development has slowed recently (mostly to accommodate the development of a few spin-offs), it seems primed to continue.

Clocking out

But if you were to ask me my favorite part of Deep Rock Galactic, it has very little to do with the action of an intense Hazard 5 mission or the joy of dressing up my dwarven miner. My absolute favorite aspect of Deep Rock Galactic is its emphasis on irreverence, and a community that often makes it feel like a home away from home.

Deep Rock Galactic is a blue-collar satire brought to life. This is a game which, upon loading into a lobby, feels like a post-work hang at your local happy hour. If I click in on one of my thumbsticks, my dwarf will often let out a “Rock and stone,” a catchphrase the dwarves and workers parrot at one another to get through the hard times. As we plumb the depths of a hazardous cavern, we shout a hearty “Rock and stone” or one of its many humorous derivatives, or bemoan Karl, an unseen but legendary lore figure who seems to have perished before our time. Little did I know at the time that this facsimile of companionship and camaraderie was precisely what I was looking for.

I found Deep Rock Galactic at one of my lowest points. It was the midst of the early pandemic, and I was lost in more ways than one. Like countless others, my days were spent feeling stranded and alone inside my apartment. Eventually, I reached out to some of my oldest and closest friends, whom I hadn’t spoken to for a long while at that point, and by their good graces, we reconciled and checked the game out. And perhaps because of that decision four-some-odd years ago, I find Deep Rock Galactic particularly endearing. It facilitated the rehabilitation of some of the most important relationships in my life. As we faked it as dwarven miners in space, we fell back into old bits, formed new inside jokes, and repaired the damage distance had wrought. We became best buds again. You know those memes where people gesture at deep late-night conversations they have while running in a circle in something like Minecraft? That was this game for me.

A full crew back at HQ, and some of them even have celebratory drinks in hand.

I loved just loading into Deep Rock Galactic and throwing back a drink with my closest friends while holding late-night confessionals. I loved slacking off at the Abyss Bar, which is tended by a bowler-hat-wearing robot named Lloyd, only for management to admonish us. I loved pissing away company time by endlessly engaging in a competition of kicking a nearby barrel into a hoop. I loved that there was a tiny dance floor where I could cut a rug (please, Ghost Ship Games, give us some kind of synchronized line dance), or the fact that failing to extract from a mission prompted us to spawn from the med bay in a patient gown with a well-placed slit, through which we could see each other’s underwear.

Even when my friends haven’t been available to play, I’ve rarely run into a crew of players that was ever hostile to me–which may as well be the default in certain other online spaces and games. Veteran players welcome “greenbeards,” or new players, with open arms, and I was never booted despite falling short of objectives, getting downed by overwhelming swarms, and failing to revive the rest of the crew to salvage the mission. This level of tolerance and patience for one another is a growing rarity, but the Deep Rock Galactic community has always enjoyed an abundance of it, and it’s something I’ve tried to carry forward as I’ve become a more-experienced player.

I think the camaraderie comes from the framing of the game. At the end of the day, we’re all at the whims of crappy managers and money men who see us as little more than digits on a spreadsheet, expendable and replaceable. Down in the mines, and in the pockets of time we get to enjoy above-ground before returning to them, we only have each other. So sure, the horrors persist, both in-game and outside of it, but so does the workman-like spirit of Deep Rock Galactic, which we carry with us.

Bucking trends

In a similar vein to how the players look out for each other, Ghost Ship Games really looks out for its community. I’ve already mentioned this in bits and pieces, but a lot of noise deserves to be made about Deep Rock Galactic’s approach to live-service content.

Each of its season passes (five and counting) are available to players entirely for free. Additionally, you keep access to those passes beyond the expiration of a season, meaning that years later, I can still access the means to unlock some cosmetics from 2021 if I so desire. Nothing gets ripped out of the game, and no one is ever gated from anything that’s been offered, unless it was tied to some event that’ll likely cycle back around. And nothing is kept from players who arrived to the game late. Just because I wasn’t actively playing during a specific season doesn’t mean I can’t ever get it. Everything of import, be it a new mission type, piece of equipment, or biome, is added to the game at no cost to the player.

While this approach is gaining some traction with other games in the live-service sphere (like Marvel Rivals), Deep Rock Galactic has long felt like the pioneer of the philosophy in the modern era, and is still the most generous of the bunch. At a time when huge publishers and developers either rip content out of the game never to return it or push microtransactions and paid season passes on their communities every few months, Deep Rock Galactic and Ghost Ship Games come out looking like saints. By rejecting the modern sensibility to nickel-and-dime its community, Ghost Ship Games has fostered one that actually sticks around and cares for the game and one another, even if it has a smaller audience compared to the Fortnites of the world.

By comparison, Deep Rock Galactic feels like a thing built to last. It isn’t built on trends or a callous model created to siphon your money and your time. Logging on and engaging in shenanigans with friends and randos alike, all the while earning little treats and trinkets like gear and cosmetics, feels intuitive and fun, rather than laborious. Despite its appearance and framing, it couldn’t be less like work. And I guess that’s what’s kept me coming back all these years, and it’s sure to keep me around another few as well. Rock and stone forever.

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