52 people found this review helpful
6 people found this review funny
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Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 4,194.5 hrs on record (365.4 hrs at review time)
Posted: 4 Oct, 2019 @ 6:06pm
Updated: 8 Sep, 2023 @ 11:58pm

Early Access Review
"There are many ways you can judge a game, but 2 of the most common are looking at a game as art, or as a product" -Joseph Anderson (paraphrased)

Deep Rock Galactic, as a product, is perfect. If you play video games, there is no better use of $30 than buying DRG. 

Unfortunately, the formatting of steam's reviews and how they are presented requires me to approach this as i am to provide this information to the people who may want to hear it.
As the game is at this moment in time, it packs more punch and value than the most expensive games money can buy, and in some cases, the hardware they run on as well.
Before i say anything else, buy the game. play 100+ hours. go enjoy yourself. these issues will likely not resonate with you until you have 1000 hours or have played for more than a year. I won't explain every issue from the perspective of launching the game for the first time, this is not to be rude to new players, but rather to protect them from coming to negative conclusions about the game in ways that won't affect them for hundreds of hours. 

Despite all the praise I will sing to get you to experience this game, the game is sick. Not in the good way. 
Bad practices, minor flaws, and misguided attention have crippled the progression of DRG and left it in the shadow of its potential.

Let's start with who this review is written by, the "hundred hour player"
 
The progression of DRG is exponential and linear for around 25 hours, and then becomes fully lateral upon reaching the overclock phase of the game. 
Once you have your first OC you have effectively reached the end of progression. Yes, you will spend hundreds more hours unlocking EVERY OC, but without taking rng into account, you have an OC slot filled, ergo you are as strong as you will get.
And that's where the endgame starts AND ends, 25 hours in, with that first overclock. You've seen it all. Hundreds upon hundreds of cosmetics are out there rattling around, but what the game is asking of you to get them is nothing beyond what you've experienced already.
The reason i refer to this as the hundred-hour play is expanding those 25 hours to all 4 classes. even that is probably overestimating, as you will see nothing new by promoting the next 3 classes.
All of that progression, OC unlocking, 100 hours amounts to nothing more than playing the same content the same way and honing your skills at playing the same content the same the same way.
The fix to this isn't new missions, more OCs, more random events, or more bloat in existing systems. The fix is asking players to interact with the existing game in new ways, ways they wouldn't unless asked.
Add 50 new items to cargo crates, nothing has changed. Ask a play to beat a mission under a certain time, without taking damage, without playing in multiplayer, and everything changes. The solution to the lateral endgame isn't more content to engage with or more random events polluting the caves. The solution is asking players to interact with existing content in new and creative ways.
This isn't to say the game is drop dead boring at any point, it remains enjoyable far, far beyond the 100 hour mark. My point is the overall content density and at this moment in time, and developer effort, are entirely dislocated from where they need to be.
The game was a 10/10 in 2019. but id go so far as to say that massively over saturating the amount of random events in an average mission has tarnished that score. Not to even mention the bloat that is currently in cargo crates, and matrix cosmetics for a player who hasn't even started yet. 

Bugs

hehe haha DRG is a bug filled game!!!!
Yeah it is, and they're taking longer and longer to fix with every passing year. I think my favorite example is the visible hit box on 1 of the corrupter's 2 attacks. A glaringly obvious bug that was undeniably noticed before season 4 even went live.
Would you like to guess how long a highly visible, egregious bug on season 4's flagship event took to fix? 75 days. Two and a half months, to disable a wire frame on a 3d model. Numerous patches were released in those 75 days. Say they had bigger fish to fry, but there's something to be said about the perception players have of the effort that was put into a particular piece of content.
The fact the corrupter even shipped with such an inexcusable graphical error is one thing, but taking nearly half of season 4s runtime to be corrected is unfathomable from a QA standpoint. 
There's plenty of other bugs with a significantly stronger impact on the games course, armor break, Dreads, and hang-fire weapons in DDs to name a few. What concerns me more is how many attempts have to be taken to fix a bug. 
look at the last 30 patches, the amount of repeat customers is hard to understand as a player. if a patch that presumable took 2 weeks to come out contains 5 items, you would expect all of those fixes to work, but that tends not to be the case.

The Client Experience

It's hard to explain how bad this feels, but if you've played DRG for any amount of time i promise you know what im referring to. The better you get at the game, the more you take advantage of and rely on split second tricks and inputs to elevate not only your output, but enjoyment of the game play.
As a non-host player, many of these skills become inaccessible and extremely frustrating to lose access to. Movement, animation cancels, and at its worst even your aim can be degraded to an instantly perceptible degree that is outright unacceptable for those who are familiar with how the game plays in solo or as the host.
I consider the game to be a notably less enjoyable experience as a non host player even when playing with someone who lives less that 10 miles away, this decay of control occurs at even the lowest latency. 
For a game that is not only marketed, but praised by its community as a co op experience, it blows my mind how much playing with other players damages either your, or their enjoyment of the games while you play.

Speaking of the community, we should talk about the Hive Mind.

Disclaimer up front, just because you partake in a lil RP or press v doesn't mean you are part of the problem. The point here is that your average member of this games cult like following will jump to the defense of those who ARE the problem.
I've been called every slur you can imagine for not saving Doretta, I've seen people who write negative reviews receive death threats, and even a redditor dig through a modded player's post history in order to abuse them with extremely personal traumatic experiences.
The overt negativity and accepted hatred of personal attacks against anyone who isn't playing the game the "right" way is mind boggling. Do i go against the grain? Absolutely, I understand that there will be some push back, but "♥♥♥ leaflover" can only get lobbed at me in game chat so many times before I start to notice a pattern.
Play our way, or else.
I understand the silent majority doesn't do this. but they certainly don't do anything to reprimand the people who are slinging hate against people who don't play like that majority *shrug* 
 

The drop in content quality and tempo since season 1, the ever increasing amount of unfixed bugs, the unfun and unituitive game mechanics like rockpox, the lack of meaningful game change for players with more than 100 hours
There's a lot more to talk about, but that's all I have the heart to go through for now. 

I'll reiterate. This game was as close to perfect as any game has ever been, but as time goes on, it is moving further away from that accolade.
Buy it if you haven't already, and forget everything you just read until you're sick of it.
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13 Comments
TheBrickFiles 14 Aug @ 1:01pm 
There is something weird about playing a game 365.4 hours, giving it a negative review, then playing for another 3,000+ hours. Also, booho, the game I've played for 365 hours of is now boring man. Like that's a you problem. If you have 365 hours, you've probably done it all and of course it's going to get boring. Every game get's more boring over time and it's hard to make a game fun for 365 hours of gameplay. Also, again, you played it for another 3,000+ hours after that fact.
bibbicus 9 Jul @ 10:34pm 
Dork
MEK 22 May @ 2:46pm 
the game is fine, but its not something your average player will put even 500 hrs into, the progression ends too fast
rohardy 6 Feb @ 8:40am 
my brother in Karl you played DRG for 1.5k hrs in last two weeks. I suggest you delete this review casue you're not making any sense lmao. Also do you even sleep? I think you severely need to touch grass.....
Mr.Heroin 3 Feb @ 3:12pm 
ma man played for 4k hrs then decided to roast the game being bald and that you do the same thing again and again and after first overclock is lame then talking abt bugs, like tf you want, ik you would like more content to be able to play 4k more hours but i think that the game fulfullilled wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than 30$ and all that for free bcs devs are chads
10D44 31 Jan @ 6:40am 
holy yap
EnderB_ 5 Dec, 2024 @ 5:28am 
so, you're saying it's a must buy but not recommended? /confused
Primrose 19 Sep, 2024 @ 12:41pm 
not reading allat lil bro
Solus_Deus 15 Sep, 2024 @ 9:29am 
Hi, could you add something to this post after playing for 3800 more hours? I am genuenly interested, if your opinion somehow changed in this time, or if you're still experiencing the same issues. I don't have that many hours in the game, as you had, even as you were posting this, but I also kinda fear that the content will become deficient as time goes on. Do the new seasons bring more content?
oceanicalex 11 May, 2024 @ 2:38pm 
I haven’t played nearly as much as you have but I do agree that the game needs more progression systems overall and the seasons need more content but we all come back to the game eventually so I think the core gameplay loop is fine for the most part.