It always warms my cynical heart to see a game I enjoy launch successfully out of Steam Early Access. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is the newest entry to that list. Steam tells me I spent about fifteen hours playing Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor before it left Early Access on September 17th, 2025. I’m quite pleased to report that DRG: Survivor was already quite enjoyable before leaving Early Access, and that its 1.0 launch has made it significantly more so. I thought fifteen hours was a lot of time to devote to an Early Access game, but DRG: Survivor has made every moment worthwhile.

There are three central questions I intend to answer within this review. They are as follows: Do you have to play “original” Deep Rock Galactic to effectively play DRG: Survivor? Has DRG: Survivor usurped Vampire Survivors as the poster child for the “Survivors-like” genre? Lastly, the rather basic question: is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor worth playing? I’m speaking as someone who has long wanted to get into “original” Deep Rock Galactic, but hasn’t yet done so because I’m terrified of being shouted at by random players who are vastly better at the game than I am.

If you’ve played Deep Rock Galactic for more than an hour or so, you’ve probably picked up the basics. You’re a Dwarf miner with one of four specializations who’s routinely sent into various biomes to harvest precious resources at the behest of your employer. The main difference between Deep Rock Galactic and its Survivor variant is that you can play in a group in the former, but you’re always flying solo in the latter. Thus, you can’t synergize with the strengths of your group members in DRG: Survivor. To compensate for that, you’re given quite a bit of extra firepower.

You’re expected to use your array of weapons to defeat waves of hostile alien insects. Each bug you kill drops experience points, and you’ll level up once you’ve collected a certain amount of experience points. Unless you’re playing Weapon Mastery mode, you start with one weapon and can acquire up to three more as you level up during a run (called a “dive” in this context). Each time you level up, you’re granted the chance to pick one of three perks that will help you during the remainder of your current dive. These usually strengthen either your weapons or your character.

You might be asked to choose between increasing the fire rate of one of your weapons or making your character move faster, for example. Most perks that affect your weapons will also increase the level of a weapon. When you get any of your weapons to level 6, 12, and finally 18, you get to choose a powerful “overclock” modifier to apply to that weapon. During each dive, you’ll have the opportunity to mine various types of minerals while you’re fighting off waves of bugs. These minerals are categorized into so-called “meta minerals” and what I’ll call “temporary minerals.”

Temporary minerals are gold and nitra. They’re temporary because they’re lost at the end of each dive, regardless of whether you succeed or fail. Between each stage of a dive, you’re expected to spend them on additional perks. You can also spend gold to restore your character’s health if you’re badly wounded. “Meta minerals,” despite the name, have nothing to do with a social media platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg (or at least, they’d better not). When you mine any of these minerals, you keep them between dives and can spend them to unlock permanent upgrades.

Permanent upgrades are the same kinds of temporary character enhancements you can pick during dives. Thus, the more minerals you harvest during each stage of each dive you undertake, the more permanent upgrades you can unlock between dives. In turn, the more permanent upgrades you get, the easier future dives will be because of those upgrades. To name just a few examples, these include things like increasing your character’s damage, movement speed, maximum health, health regeneration, and chance to score critical hits. There are quite a few more useful aspects of your characters that you can upgrade than these, however.

Permanent upgrades passively apply to all four playable classes: the Scout, the Engineer, the Gunner, and the Driller. You start with only the Scout available. You’ll unlock the other classes as you increase your player rank, which you do by getting high scores during dives and increasing your rank with each of the four classes. When you reach certain ranks on any of the playable classes, you’ll unlock “class mods,” which are different ways of playing each class. Each class mod has its own Weapon Mastery runs, where you’ll have to complete a three-stage dive using only one specific weapon.

To get back to the first of my three central questions, I would say you don’t need to be familiar with Deep Rock Galactic to enjoy DRG: Survivor. Having knowledge of Deep Rock Galactic would help you understand the story and setting of DRG: Survivor and much of the lingo used in both games, but none of that knowledge is necessary to play DRG: Survivor. Basically, if you’re familiar with the high-fantasy trope that Dwarves are naturally excellent miners and blacksmiths, and you know anything about modern capitalism and labor unions, that’s all the background information you need.

Even then, you’d likely enjoy DRG: Survivor even without knowing any of that stuff if you like any other games in the rapidly growing “Survivors-like” genre. However, I would also argue that the knowledge you gain from playing DRG: Survivor would not necessarily translate well into playing “original” Deep Rock Galactic. Even though you can play solo in both games, a lot of the mechanics are different between the two. There’s also a lot of common etiquette and “unwritten rules” you’ll be expected to know when playing alongside groups in Deep Rock Galactic. The two games are similar, yet different enough in terms of their player experiences.

Let’s now move on to my second central question. I know this is entirely subjective, but I truly believe Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor may well have usurped the throne of the “Survivors-like” genre from the game that gave the genre its name. Granted, I’ve played quite a lot less of Vampire Survivors than I’ve played of DRG: Survivor, so there may well be a lot I don’t know about the former title. I’m giving DRG: Survivor such high praise because, put simply, I enjoy having something to do other than wait for swarms of enemies to try and kill me.

It seems to me that in Vampire Survivors, you don’t have much to do other than, well, survive for as long as you can. In DRG: Survivor, being able to roam around the map during each stage of a dive and gather minerals I can spend on permanent upgrades gives me a comparatively much more tangible sense that I’m making progress toward an ultimate goal. There’s also the fact that DRG: Survivor implements time pressure in multiple ways to keep things interesting and help me stay focused on my objectives during each dive. That’s true in both the “Elimination” and “Escort Duty” game modes.

In Elimination mode, each dive is comprised of five stages. When you reach the final stage, your only objective is to draw out and defeat an unusually strong alien insect called a Dreadnought. At the end of each of the preceding stages, however, you’ll have to defeat an elite enemy to complete the stage. Once the elite enemy enters the battlefield, all the hostile insects grow progressively stronger based on how long it takes you to kill the elite. Sticking around for longer lets you farm more experience and minerals, but taking too much time becomes increasingly risky very quickly.

That’s not the only time pressure you’ll have to contend with, though. As soon as you complete the main objective of each stage, you have thirty seconds to enter a drop pod that will take you to the next stage of the current dive. If you don’t enter the drop pod within that time limit, it will leave without you, and you’ll fail the dive. Depending on how much distance there is between you and the drop pod at the moment you finish a stage, that might not be an issue. However, you might have to rush to reach the drop pod in time.

That last thirty-second timer gives you another chance to vacuum up any experience points and minerals you can grab, but you really can’t afford to focus on that so much that you get distracted and miss the drop pod. Thankfully, you don’t have to be all the way inside the drop pod when the timer runs out. As long as you’re at least standing on its entrance ramp at that point, you’ll be safe. That has saved quite a few of my runs thus far, usually because I was overconfident about how many resources I could grab in that short time.

I’ve spent long enough discussing what I like about DRG: Survivor, so I want to briefly turn my attention to the (very few) things I dislike about it. I’ll admit right up front that the majority of my complaints are just me nitpicking, which I interpret as quite a good sign. Firstly, some of the dwarves’ spoken dialogue can become repetitive and grating over time. When you pick a rare-quality upgrade during a dive, your character will probably say something like, “You don’t see these every day!” Hmm, it’s almost as if that’s the actual definition of words like “rare” and “uncommon.”

Sticking with spoken dialogue, none of the playable dwarves speak with the stereotypical “high-fantasy dwarf” accent consistently. I can’t help but wonder if the voice actors occasionally forgot they were voicing characters that high-fantasy buffs such as myself have been conditioned to expect will speak with certain accents. I find it slightly jarring whenever I hear my current character rapidly switch back and forth between speaking regularly and speaking the way World of Warcraft has made me expect dwarves to speak. Admittedly, I know this might be the tiniest nit there is to pick when it comes to DRG: Survivor.

Now it’s finally time for me to address my last central question: Is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor worth playing? The short answer is, “yes, absolutely.” The long answer is as follows: I can’t remember if I’ve ever given a perfect 10 out of 10 score to any game I’ve reviewed here on Phenixx Gaming. Regardless of whether I have or not, I’m not giving DRG: Survivor such high praise idly. I wouldn’t have said DRG: Survivor is the new “king” of the “Survivors-like” genre if I didn’t genuinely believe that. I’m more than happy to categorically recommend Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

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Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

$12.99

10

Score

10.0/10

Pros

• Highly engaging core gameplay loop.
• Quite well-implemented sense of progression.
• Firm, but fair time pressure mechanics.

Cons

• Some dialogue can become repetitive and grating over time.
• I often forget the mini-map exists because gameplay is usually so busy.