Deep Rock Galactic Review and the Co-op Built on Shared Tools

Most co-op shooters say they reward teamwork, then let one skilled player carry the other three. I spent years on ranked ladders where that was the whole meta: find the strongest pick, ignore whoever else is in the lobby, and win anyway. Deep Rock Galactic is the first co-op game I played where that approach falls apart within a single mission, and not because the enemies are harder. The cave itself refuses to cooperate with a solo hero.

Ghost Ship Games, a studio in Copenhagen, released it in full in May 2020 after roughly two years of early access, with Coffee Stain publishing. Up to four players drop into a procedurally generated asteroid cave as space dwarves, dig toward an objective, fight off waves of insect-like Glyphids, and run back to a drop pod before it leaves. That loop sounds thin on paper. What holds it together is how the four classes split the tools you need to get anywhere.

Four kits, and none of them is complete

Every class carries a weapon loadout, but the interesting part is the traversal and utility gear, because each dwarf owns a piece of the answer to "how do we get over there?"

Read that list as a set of dependencies. A Scout can grapple to a gold vein on a ceiling, but without Engineer platforms there is often nowhere to stand while mining it. A Driller can bore a tunnel to the objective, though the tunnel is pitch black until the Scout fires a flare into it. The Gunner's zipline turns a long detour around a ravine into a quick slide, and his shield is the thing that turns a swarm wipe into a revive.

Ranked games trained me to think of other players as variance. Here they are infrastructure.

Why it does not collapse into one best class

Competitive communities love a tier list, and Deep Rock Galactic has plenty floating around. I think they matter less here than in almost any other team game, for a structural reason: the caves are generated fresh each mission, so the terrain decides which tool is most valuable on a given run.

A mission through narrow, winding tunnels rewards a Driller who can just cut straight lines. A huge open cavern in the Glacial Strata, full of ice and long drops, makes the Gunner's zipline and the Scout's hook far more useful. You cannot pre-plan a dominant pick because you do not know the map until you land. That randomness, which would be a fairness complaint in a ranked shooter, is exactly what keeps every class wanted.

There is also a resupply system that quietly forces sharing. Calling a resupply pod costs 80 Nitra, a red mineral the whole team mines into a shared pool, and each pod drops four ammo slots. The math nudges you to call pods together and to split them, rather than one player hoarding. It is a small design choice, but it reads as the game telling you whose ammo this is: everyone's.

Solo play exists, with a drone called Bosco that mines and revives, and it is a fair way to learn the cave layouts. It is a lesser version of the game, though, and I would not judge the whole thing by a few solo runs. A lot of what makes it good only appears once a second human is carrying the other half of the toolkit.

The common advice to find a fixed squad first

Nearly every co-op recommendation, including our own It Takes Two review, assumes you already have a partner or a regular group. For many co-op games that is fair advice. For this one I would push back on it.

Deep Rock Galactic has one of the friendlier public matchmaking scenes I have seen, and a lot of that is design rather than luck. There is no score screen ranking players against each other, no kill count shown at the end, and no way to lose rank by playing badly. Everyone earns the same mission payout. The running joke of shouting "Rock and Stone!" via a salute button, plus the habit of buying a round at the Abyss Bar on the space rig between missions, gives strangers a low-stakes way to be friendly without needing voice chat.

That is the same pattern we wrote about in telling a healthy gaming community from a noisy one: when a game stops rewarding blame, players stop assigning it. You can still hit a bad lobby. Hosts can kick players, and occasionally someone leaves mid-mission, which our piece on why online matches drop mid game covers in more detail. In my experience those moments feel rarer here than the genre average, though I cannot back that with anything beyond my own sessions.

Where public lobbies do struggle

The friendliness has a ceiling. On the hardest Hazard levels, and especially in the weekly Elite Deep Dive, a three-stage run where health and ammo carry over from one stage to the next, a random group that does not communicate will usually fail. If you want that end of the game, you need a group that talks, and the "skip the fixed squad" advice stops applying.

What it gets wrong

The progression wants a lot from you. Each class has its own level track, and promoting a class means reaching level 25 and spending a pile of credits and minerals, a loop which some players enjoy and others find a chore spread across four characters. Weapon upgrades unlock through a mix of credits, minerals and blueprints dropped by random missions, so you can go a long time without the one overclock you want.

Mission variety also thins out over long stretches. There are several mission types, from Mining Expeditions and Egg Hunts to Escort Duty, where you protect a slow drilling machine named Doretta, but the underlying rhythm of dig, defend, extract stays the same. If that core loop does not grab you in the first few evenings, more hours will not change your mind.

The free seasons have helped. The studio has added content through seasonal updates without a paid battle pass, selling only cosmetic packs on the side, which is a model I wish more live games followed. Still, someone expecting a story campaign will find almost none.

Who should play it, and who should skip it

Play it if you like co-op where your role matters even when you are not the best shot in the lobby, if you enjoy public matchmaking more than organizing a group chat, or if you came from competitive games and are tired of every teammate feeling like a liability. It is also one of the easier games to recommend to a friend with a lower skill level, because a good Engineer who builds platforms and turrets contributes as much as a sharp Gunner.

Skip it if you want a story, if you dislike repetition, or if you mostly play alone and do not plan to change that. The Bosco drone keeps solo playable, but the game was built around the handoff between four incomplete kits.

If you try it this week, my one suggestion: play your first five missions as Engineer or Scout, the two classes that most obviously serve the rest of the team, and pay attention to how often someone else's tool gets you somewhere you could not reach. That moment is the whole review in miniature. More of our verdicts sit in the games section.