Deep Rock Galactic Review – Off To Work We Go

Publisher: Coffee Stain Publishing

Developer: Ghost Ship Games

Release: February 28, 2018

Rating: Teen

Reviewed on: PC

Also on: Xbox One

The great triumph of Deep Rock Galactic is transforming drudgery into something thrilling, repeatable, and fun. You work for a corporation that cares more about minor profits than your survival. You are sent into dark caves to hack away small quantities of minerals. And your rewards are paltry compared to the risk you face, squaring off against massive alien bugs that hunger for your flesh. Yet as a stalwart space dwarf doing what he does best, you’re having a grand time, because the game’s systems contrive to transform that work into something magical.

One big reason for that is the smartly structured approach to cooperative play. Deep Rock Galactic may be played solo, with the help of an A.I. drone to aid in your mining efforts, but it’s profoundly less enjoyable. The game is at its best with a full four-person team of miners working together, ideally with a full spread of the available classes. Thankfully, a fast and responsive backend allows for quick joining or hosting of sessions, so good grouping is possible even if your friends aren’t around.

The four classes are thoughtfully balanced and play well together, complementing each other’s skill sets. The Scout’s speed, flare gun, and grappling hook get him quickly to where he needs to be. The Driller’s tunneling capabilities expedite any endeavor or escape, and his flamethrower is a crowd control boon. The Gunner’s weaponry holds the line in any fight, and his zip lines make team navigation manageable. And the engineer’s platform creation enables the mining of spots that might otherwise seem impossible to reach, even as his automatic turrets help hold specific control zones. Taken together, each adds something invaluable to the group, and I enjoyed my time with each.

In any given mining run, your space mining crew is sent hurtling into the depths of a mineral-rich behemoth of a planet, which also just happens to be overrun by hostile alien bugs. Sometimes you’re just there to collect a particular type of rock, but other objectives keep things interesting, from eliminating particularly nasty foes to retrieving the goods left behind by a previous mining crew that didn’t make it out. Secondary objectives lend an interesting risk/reward dynamic, adding time and danger in the depths, but with significant boosts to your payout. And as you climb the ladder of harder missions, there are other secrets to uncover, from hidden cosmetics in long-lost collapsed caves, to challenging “machine events” that throw in an extra challenging combat exchange. With a pickaxe in hand, there’s a satisfying balance in each mission between figuring out how to reach that elevated gold vein, and then switching gears to stave off a horde of attackers. Battles are intense and challenging, and demand constant teamwork.

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Regardless, the procedurally generated cave systems are fascinating and expansive. The game encourages a focus on discovery and exploration – the mapping and objective markers are limited. That’s frequently a ton of fun, leading to moments of excitement as you smash through a dirt wall to find a massive crystalline chamber just beyond. However, at times the focus on freeform wandering can lead to a sense of aimlessness. Likewise, the game makes great use of light, as the dwarves send out rechargeable flares (or the scout’s longer-lasting flare gun blasts) to survey the area. But the overriding sense of oppressive darkness can wear thin after a time, and the shifting light sources mean that it’s easy to get lost.

In between work shifts, your time back on the space rig features some fun interjections, especially when shared with others. You upgrade a beer brewing license with newly discovered materials, letting you toast each other before a number of silly effects take over, like lighting you on fire, or changing your size. Some drinks can even offer a buff for the next mission. You’ve got a place to dance a dwarven jig to the nearby jukebox, and a button to turn off gravity in the station for a time. Or how about you just kick some barrels around? It’s all frivolous and amusing.

This space station is also where you gradually upgrade your miner’s equipment as they climb through the levels. Consistent play leads to an array of perks, but most of them have only minor effects on the chance of success. A few unlockable weapons await each class, and an array of upgrades for armor and the rest of your arsenal. However, many of the most important upgrades are acquired in the early hours, and the focus shifts to a very slow cosmetic unlock path. I found myself wishing for some more meaningful options and customization after a time; the game demands many hours of investment to tweak your look to exactly the way you like, and more gameplay-affecting upgrades would have been welcome. You eventually open up “promotion,” which adds some new extended missions and a few additional upgrade options. With that said, the leveling curve is relatively flat, and characters of disparate levels can generally play just fine with one another, except on the hardest settings.

Minor quibbling about progression or navigation frustration aside, Deep Rock Galactic is consistently a great time, and highly replayable. The dwarves grumble and shout at each other, complaining about their lot, but happily tackle each new challenge with dogged determinism. It’s immensely satisfying to have your whole team empty out into a new cavern, and then immediately set to work chipping away at rock and bug alike. Even transplanted from their popularization in Tolkien or Snow White and into a dark corner of space, the essence of the dwarven fantasy is richly realized here, and consistently makes me smile. Bring some friends, a handy pickaxe, and a cantankerous attitude, and you’ll be smiling as well.

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Score: 8.5

Summary: Tightly balanced between resource gathering and fierce shooting exchanges, this dwarven mining expedition is a great time – especially with friends.

Concept: There’s a planet to mine, and it’s filled with deadly alien bugs. You’re space dwarves –  get to it.

Graphics: The star of the show is the lighting from your flares, as the balance between darkness and light in the deep caves adds a lot to the gameplay.

Sound: Foul-mouthed and grumpy dwarves make you laugh with their boisterous shouts, and the occasional high-octane musical riff lets you know things are about to get real.

Playability: Each of four classes is thoughtfully balanced and fun, with solid options for difficulty selection. The limited mapping and waypoint options are purposeful, but can frustrate at times.

Entertainment: A fantastic cooperative experience that delves deep into one narrow corner of fantasy tropes – the dwarven love of hard work and pretty rocks.

Replay: High

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Minecraft Dungeons Review – Familiarity Needs Content

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: Mojang

Release: 2020

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, Switch, PC

Minecraft Dungeons is a roller-coaster ride of an action/RPG, giving new players a fairly deep representation of the genre while providing veterans a nice diversion from traditionally grimdark trappings. Minecraft’s familiar world, tools, and other elements seamlessly make the transition from the mainline series. Its suite of enemies is a natural fit for this type of game, and Mojang introduces new members of the menagerie to fill out a few missing archetypes. Unfortunately, Minecraft Dungeons’ padded-out midgame is repetitive even among its grind-heavy peers. The first big drop in this ride had me screaming, but it wasn’t from exhilaration.

Minecraft’s “play how you want to” philosophy is a driving force in Dungeons. When you start, you pick a skin for your character, but not a class; instead, Dungeons has more of free-flowing feel. One moment I was taking down zombies with a flurry of up-close dagger strikes, only to smack a golem in the forehead with a newly found giant hammer a few minutes later. That flexibility is a great goal, and I appreciate not being held down by choices I made hours ago. The implementation of this freedom isn’t fully successful, however.

In its first few hours, the power progression comes as quickly as the leveling. Sure, the loot drops aren’t as frequent as you might expect from an action/RPG, but since just about every piece of equipment you find is an upgrade in one way or another, it doesn’t matter. After you settle into the midgame, when progress comes at a comparative crawl, the cracks are hard to ignore.

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Most notably, you’re completely at the mercy of probability tables when it’s time to replace your weapons, armor, or artifacts. You can’t upgrade an item’s fundamental level as you outgrow it, and there aren’t stores that sell specific pieces, so you can’t craft or customize anything new to fit your desired playstyle. This approach severely limits your options, because, without any foundational class abilities, everything your character can do is determined by the items you have equipped. No matter how much you want to be a tanky fighter, you can’t unless you are lucky enough to have the right equipment at the appropriate level.

You get these items as rewards for defeating enemies, but you also use in-game currency to buy blind-box chests from merchants. The contents of these chests are so wide in scope that they’re essentially worthless. You can buy chests with gear or artifacts, but “gear” encompasses all categories of weapons and armor – swords, bows, armor, axes, maces, daggers, and more. “Artifacts” include every type of spell-like ability, from pet-summoning to healing. This turns every blacksmith visit into a virtual casino, and rather than looking forward to what each transaction might bring, I started to dread every encounter with the smith. Good luck getting what you’re after.

Getting gear may not adhere to the overall Minecraft spirit, but Dungeons’ take on enchanting is interesting. When you eventually get a weapon or suit of armor that you like, you can add special abilities through enchantments. A degree of randomization is at play here, with potential enchantments pulled from a large pool, but I enjoyed seeing the different possibilities. For instance, a burning enchantment sets enemies within melee range ablaze. Piercing gives arrows the ability to travel through multiple enemies. A set of armor can be imbued with a snowball enchantment, firing icy projectiles automatically at short intervals to stun enemies. Better quality gear has a higher chance of having better enchant options and additional slots.

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Artifacts are essentially your skills, and they can be equipped like gear. These operate on cooldowns, and, coupled with enchants, allow for some basic and satisfying synergies. A fireworks arrow lets you fire a special projectile with a damaging blast radius. I loved this artifact on its own, but using it with a bow equipped with multishot and infinity enchants not only gave me a random chance of firing several of these explosive payloads at once, but of nocking an additional one for a bonus follow-up salvo. Combinations like these are rewarding, which makes it even more of a bummer knowing that I’d eventually out-level their utility without a reliable way of finding replacements. Levels have defined loot tables, so it’s possible to target your desired loot a little, but it would be great to have some more agency when it comes to gearing up.

Curiously, for a game with such a focus on items, managing them is a bare-bones affair. You can’t mark items as favorites or junk, or create gear sets for different purposes – say a loadout that focuses on support skills like healing when playing co-op, or a pure survivability build for solo play. You can’t share loot that you’ve found with other players, either. Loot is targeted for individual players when you’re grouping together, so you don’t have to worry about someone else stealing gear, but the collaborative element of keeping an item so you can give it to your buddy later is sorely missing.

Minecraft Dungeons nails the franchise aesthetic, with 10 main story levels based on a variety of the mainline game’s biomes. Your adventure begins with a visit to a village in distress, before taking you through the autumnal Pumpkin Pastures, the rainy (and appropriately named) Soggy Swamp, through the Desert Temple, and ultimately an encounter with the evil Arch-Illager. This evil sorcerer swoops in several times throughout the campaign, which lasts around five hours, summoning minions and generally being a pain.

Beating the campaign unlocks a higher Adventure difficulty setting, with better loot and tougher monsters. Beat that, and you get the Apocalypse setting, which promises even more of everything. I managed to do so over the course of several marathon sessions, but it’s not worth the trouble. The awkward middle period of the game lasts entirely too long; that’s when you can see the possibilities that the various enchantments and items have, but none of the drops are good enough to live up to that potential. I didn’t get any drops with three enchantment slots until the tail end of Adventure mode – after playing the same levels over and over again for about a dozen hours. Every item I picked up was a compromise in some way, but not in a fun or gratifying way. The difficultly is simply tuned too high to make all but a few items viable. It’s fun to have a llama or wolf pet, but they die almost instantly against enchanted foes. It’s better to take on another healing item instead. Useful, sure, but boring.

Once the initial novelty of recognizing familiar elements from the Minecraft world wears off, you’re left with a remarkable sense of déjà vu. Sure, levels are procedurally generated, but barely so. I was convinced that something was broken since the variation between playthroughs was so slight. I played one level back to back and was proven wrong. The main beats of a particular stage are the same session to session, with subtle variations in where hallways may go or whether one section will have a few extra rooms. I’m not expecting completely reworked levels, but it makes exploration boring. That’s inexcusable for a Minecraft game, and it feels stingy. I eventually stopped trying to clear out the map fog before finishing a level, because I knew the majority of the discoveries would be worthless. Sure, there might be a pot at the end of a hallway with five emeralds inside, but when you consider the smith charges upward of 100 gems for a chest, it’s just not worth the effort.

I was also puzzled by the overall lack of interactivity within the stages. I wasn’t expecting fully destructible environments or the ability to tunnel my way through the world; that’s what actual Minecraft is for. But the lack of any real interactive elements in the worlds makes it feel like you’re touring a museum. Crates, barrels, and other genre staples are in abundance, but your weapons pass harmlessly through them. Even Creepers detonate without leaving so much as a scratch on the environment, failing even to break nearby pots. Again, I’m not expecting them to leave massive craters across the world, but their implementation in Dungeons falls completely flat.

Overall, I’d say my frustrations with Minecraft Dungeons are amplified because I love so much of what it does. Mojang effectively tapped what makes Minecraft Minecraft, and I marveled over the various nods and references throughout my early sessions. Witches toss (and drink) potions like they do in the mainline game, making them a priority elimination in larger battles. Endermen and Evokers pop up as mid-bosses, adding a sense of urgency and danger to the adventure. There’s even a Treasure Goblin analog, though it’s a pig with a treasure chest on its back, which you can loot after chasing it down. It’s a joy to stroll through these worlds at first, but playing the same handful of levels back to back to back gives way to monotony.

Minecraft Dungeons has a solid core, and I’d love to see where it goes from here. Hopefully, Mojang recognizes the fact that games with grinding don’t have to be as much of a grind. It would be great to have some kind of way to experience levels in a remixed format, similar to how Diablo III has rifts or Torchlight and Path of Exile offer more randomized maps to encourage replays. But Minecraft Dungeons’ current approach is simply replaying the same stuff over again, and just isn’t enough.

Score: 7

Summary: Minecraft Dungeons’ padded-out midgame is repetitive even among its grind-heavy peers.

Concept: An approachable action/RPG set within the world of Minecraft, featuring recognizable creatures and biomes

Graphics: Minecraft’s iconic aesthetic shines and looks great as a backdrop for the action

Sound: The score beautifully fits with what you’ve come to expect from Minecraft. Audio is light overall, and the silent heroes, as on-brand as they may be, feel weird

Playability: Aim assists make targeting enemies at range a breeze, and melee has a satisfying bite. However, combat is repetitive, even within a genre built on the grind

Entertainment: The first few hours are a treat, and the late game has a nice element of experimentation. Unfortunately, its flaws balloon during the lengthy middle stretch.

Replay: High

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Maneater Review – King Of The Sea

Publisher: Tripwire Interactive

Developer: Tripwire Interactive

Release: TBA

Reviewed on: Xbox One

Also on: PlayStation 4, Switch, PC

Seals dart playfully in the ocean waters as sunbathers crowd the beaches to relax in the golden sands. For the bull shark that lurks in the dark waters below, this idyllic scene is a lunch buffet. With an insatiable hunger driving its actions, the shark devours the seals and humans, turning the ocean and sands red. Nothing is safe from this killing machine in the sea or on land. The shark needs to feast to grow large enough to exact revenge on the human hunter that killed her mother.

That’s Maneater, an open-water RPG by Tripwire Interactive that puts you in control of an enraged bull shark. This experience is dark and violent, but also surprisingly fun, delivering big laughs, a nice progression system, and plenty of visual variety in the six to eight hours it takes to grow from a baby that feeds on catfish to a legendary mega shark that can leap from the water and crush hunting barges.

The shark’s journey to adulthood is cleverly presented as a reality show that does a great job fleshing out the antagonist, a hunter named Scaly Pete who ripped the baby bull shark from her mother’s womb. Before tossing the baby to the sea, Pete cut her with a knife to create a scar he would recognize years later when the shark would be large enough to hunt. When the hunters aren’t telling their stories in front of a camera, the shark's life is periodically told through short narrative bursts by actor Chris Parnell. He does a fine job, but you don’t hear enough from him to truly sell the vision of the shark being recorded for a show.

The entire focus of the game is to eat. From the moment you gain control of the baby, you need to consume everything you see, be it fish, turtles, or even license plates. Everything you consume gives you experience points. The smaller snacks give you less, but if you are feeling lucky, you can take on a high-level alligator for a huge haul of XP. The shark grows as she levels up, and also evolves in unexpected ways.

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You eventually earn electricity coursing through your teeth, bone armor on your fins, and enhanced eyes that help you see more of the ocean’s secrets. These upgrades are silly in concept, but they help sell the idea of this bull shark being unique and capable of being the king of the sea.

The shark is easy to control when she’s swimming through open waters and even in tight caverns, but acts like an uncontrollable wrecking ball in combat situations. As she tries to keep track of her target, which can dodge and dart all over the place, her teeth gnash wildly, sometimes hitting flesh, most times catching nothing but water. Boss battles against orcas and sperm whales that have huge health meters end up looking like a chaotic mess – dogfighting at super speed.

Yes, it is annoying that even with a lock-on you lose track of your target so often, but the battles are rarely challenging. You just have to stick with your target, disengage to eat when your health gets low, then return to the chaos. You don’t have much of an arsenal to work with, just chomping, a tail whip to stun enemies, a dodge roll, and more chomping. The lack of variety in the move set isn’t that big of a detractor, however, as the amusement of eating everything possible doesn’t lose its bite.

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For a game about a shark, you also spend a surprising amount of time out of water, leaping over walls, soaring to nab collectibles out of the air, or beaching yourself to feed on humans. If there are homes or streets next to water, the shark explores them as you consume humans from within their safe zones. This action is handled extremely well, allowing the shark to bounce along the ground and lunge at people. They run away, but not very well. When the shark is fully leveled, a good 15 humans can be digested before needing to return to the sea before suffocating.

The world is divided up into themed areas, starting with a swamp and ending with the great depths of the ocean. Each area brings different species to eat, wildly different viewpoints both above and below the water, and a handful of missions. These assignments don’t have much variety or meat on their bones; you basically need to eat 10 of one thing, kill as many humans as possible, and then take on the apex predators of the area, which are basically the boss fights. If you eat enough humans, you increase your wanted level (much like Grand Theft Auto’s), which brings out different hunters tied to Pete. Each of the 13 hunters brings plenty of firepower and support. You need to go airborne to rip the hunters from their boats, or use your body to sink them. Once you've completed enough missions, you move on to the next area. As you grow, you can backtrack to previous areas to smash through fences that you couldn't before. All told, there's a nice loop of exploration and rewards that stretches from start to finish.

One of my favorite parts of this experience is tracking down landmarks, which brings a fair bit of humor, some great pop-culture references, and cool visuals. Each landmark is accompanied by a little voiceover from Parnell who tells you what it is. There are dozens to track down, one of which is the mafia’s underwater burial ground (you even get to take down the mafia here), and another shows you the vent where Godzilla comes from. I even found a cave that held Pennywise the clown.

Maneater is an enjoyable hunt that satisfies in its shark mayhem and story of revenge. The action is a bit repetitive and chaotic, but the goofiness of the violence ends up winning out. This is the first shark game I’ve truly enjoyed. It has cult classic written all over it.

Score: 8

Summary: Playing as a shark in an underwater story of revenge is hilarious and fun.

Concept: Play as a shark and eat everything you can so you can get revenge on the hunter that killed your mom

Graphics: The world above and below the sea has a lot of style to soak in. The bull shark and bosses also have a cool, unique flair to them

Sound: The underwater sound effects for action are a bit cheesy, and the voice of Chris Parnell is underutilized

Playability: Combat is loose, chaotic, and hard to decipher – but biting hapless humans sure is amusing

Entertainment: Maneater is weird, different, and just flat-out fun. I had to see where this story was going, and I thoroughly enjoyed its developments

Replay: Moderate

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