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How Deep Rock Galactic Season 5 drills back down to basicsMine craft
Mine craft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
Dwarvenco-opcaperDeep Rock Galactichas spent years raising the stakes. Where its offworld mining concern once dealt merely with steep drops and irate bugs, it’s since had toface down the robotic armyof a rival mineral corp and anomnicidal alien plague. If the subsequent question is “It used to be about therocks, y’know?” then DRG’s imminentSeason 5 update, Drilling Deeper, is the answer.
While matching previous seasons in scope, and even serving as a tie-in to the upcoming roguelike spinoffDeep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, Season 5 is also a refocusing of sorts. Those newer threats are put on pause, in favour of a renewed emphasis on the deadly spelunking and freeform digging that had previously established DRG as one of the most unique shooters around. It’s why the new mission type, Deep Scan, is all about venturing further into the crunchy crust of Hoxxes IV than ever before – even if it means hitching a ride on a wildly unsafe “Drillevator” to get there.
Deep Rock Galactic: Season 05 - Narrated TrailerWatch on YouTube
Deep Rock Galactic: Season 05 - Narrated Trailer
In parts, this was classic Deep Rock: scoot through a cave to an objective, plant some cartoonishly oversized mechanism on it, and wait for a bar to fill up while space insects tried to nibble our beards. Yet there were plenty of new cogs in the machine, including the cave itself, the result of a new proc-gen design that turned the usually spacious sand biome into a discombobulating ants' nest of twisty tunnels. I’m not too ashamed to admit I got lost numerous times, though five seasons in, the injection of a little navigational uncertainty isn’t the worst thing in the world.
This is usually the most you’ll see of a Glyphid Stalker: an outline, next to a dwarf about to be relieved of his shields. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
Since Hoxxes IV is an ugly planet – a bug planet – the local fauna have been evolving too. The Vartok Scalebramble proved short on extermination thrills, mainly just sitting on cave ceilings waiting for us to shoot its weak points off, but the Glyphid Stalker made for a much more formidable opponent. It’s a cloaked ambush predator, likeHelldivers 2’s Stalkers, except much better camouflaged, only giving off the slightest shimmer that’s easy to miss in DRG’s hectic fights. As such, they nailed me, repeatedly, delivering the added punishment of a shield-sapping EMP effect that opened me up for their weaker brethren to munch on.
They’re devious little bastards, though the Stalkers aren’t the grossest of Season 5’s foes. Those would be the Core Spawn Crawlers, an uncomfortably humanoid mix of man, bug, and mineral that swarmed us during an attempt at the new Core Stone event. Like Korlok Tyrant-Weeds, Core Stones are randomly occurring, optional side-targets that yield valuable resources at the cost of starting a potentially ammo-draining battle; in this case, against a gang of slinking rockpeople rather than a sentient plant. They’re quick and tough, and while they ultimately couldn’t stop us breaking through the Core Stone monolith to grab the goodies within, the fact that they so barely resemble any other creature in DRG did leave me both unsettled and curious.
Creepy crawlers indeed. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
This, it turned out, was the point. Season 5’s links to Rogue Core are more subtle than overt (there’s no, say, post-game cutscene where an eyepatched Mission Control tells your dwarf he’s putting a team together), but hints are dropped that you might be drilling too deep for your own good. The Core Spawn Crawlers, who Akopyan tells me will also appear in the spinoff, simply represent the first sign that the company might soon have a self-inflicted mess on its hands – one that will need cleaning up in Rogue Core.
What followed was DRG’s version of every slow-moving funicular defence setpiece you’ve ever played in an FPS, as a horde of rattled Glyphids swarmed out of the freshly drilled rock and onto our claustrophobic metal ring. Familiar, perhaps, but I loved it. The constantly moving platform and lack of escape routes made the descent feel dramatic and desperate, much more so than the static action sequences that the game usually trades in. Especially when the drill jams on a particularly stubborn rock layer, forcing one dwarf’s gun to go quiet to fix it. I play DRG pretty much weekly, and this was the first time in months that I felt on the verge of drowning in a mandible sea – deep enough in the depths that my body would never be found, buried in a perfectly circular grave next to two game developers.
Watch the skies while on the Drillevator. Or, at least, the higher-up dirt. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
Survive we did, though, and our reward was a surprisingly soft landing inside the promised geode. A few moments of seed collection and gawking at the (strangely beautiful) crystal cavern later, it was time to extract using another work-related expense: souped-up jet boots that could propel us all the way back up the Drillevator hole. This, too, was fun as heck, and after a battle that intentionally nullified our team’s movement abilities, gaining the power of flight felt like the perfect climactic turnabout.
Basically, I now want to go on many, many more Deep Scans. It’s just a merry, flowing, mining-focused mission type of the sort DRG hasn’t gained since 2020; I know Season 1 added Industrial Sabotage missions, but those focus on the fighting the robots, and are thus not good. Besides, even if we’re on the verge of digging up something truly horrific, a pivot back towards rockbreaking does make a lot of sense. I mean, look at these bearded lads. They’re not master hacking technicians or virology experts. They’re miners. Theymine.
Cluster rockets make short work of Mactera swarms. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Coffee Stain Publishing
As a whole, Season 5 isn’t quite as concerned with reworking the fundamentals. Indeed, in many ways it’s returning to them, after successive high-concept detours from the core mining concept. Even so, it does look like another quality update, working in the Rogue Core link without turning into an advert and adding plenty of new things to see, do, and thwack with a pickaxe. It’s out officially on June 13th, with an Experimental Branch release on June 4th.
