One of my favourite games of all time, if you couldn't tell by the playtime. The way you interact with terrain with Engineer and Driller as well as the sheer speed and movement flexibility of scout (my main, on which I have almost 30 elite promotions at the time of writing this review) make it incredibly fun to play. Killing bugs feels satisfying, the objectives on most missions allow for a fair amount of player autonomy so you don't need to play too close to your team all the time. There's a lot to like about the game.
Why the negative review, then? Unfortunately, developers of the game recently decided to practically abandon the game in favour of a rogue-lite spinoff called Rogue Core (for those unfamiliar, rogue-lites are a genre of early access ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ classified as such because they include some form of randomness and brainless stat-multiplication, named after Rogue because that game had randomness in the form of procedural generation... and uh... yeah that's all), leaving this game to an outsource development team that then released the worst seasonal update the game has ever seen, that being season 6. Don't get me wrong, the last few seasons before season 6 had been immense ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ too - Deep Scan lags the hell out of your game as it progresses, likely due to a memory leak, and the game's netcode simply can't handle the sheer amount of terrain destroyed as the mission closes, adding network lag on top of even worse framerates. One of the newest enemies added before season 6, the Corespawn Crawler, is a bullet sponge with a weakpoint the size of a peanut (which it may decide to not even expose, depending on the horoscope) that can also leap at you like a coyote and hit you even if you're running straight away from it, all while spawning in considerable numbers, prompting most teams to not even attempt the event that spawns it, UNLESS... there is a gunner on the team, who can just throw a zipline down for his entire team to sit on, at which point the event becomes a complete joke as Crawlers can no longer reach you. Amazing game design.
But, as I said, all of this pales in comparison to the monumental pile of ♥♥♥♥ that season 6 is - the single smallest seasonal content update the game has seen, where all that was added was a drab (but admittedly atmospheric) biome and two new enemies exclusive to said biome - a scarab with hit detection so inconsistent that you might as well not bother dodging or reading its movement, and a ground-leech that can grab you from so far away that you might think the game bears you a personal grudge. Oh, and also a mission type that transforms your frames per second into seconds per frame every time you complete an objective, again due to the sheer amount of terrain being updated. And of course, to slap a band-aid on the microscopic amount of content the season added, the seasonal modifiers for season 6 just regurgitate these scarabs and ground-leeches into biomes outside of the one newly added in season 6.
Speaking of content regurgitation, did I mention that the last two updates the game has gotten are 1. an event that forces even more of those God-awful Corespawn Crawlers upon you and 2. a shill update with an assignment rewarding players with the pickaxe skin from Rogue Core just to get more eyes on their upcoming wire coat hanger abortion of a video game?
Since I'm on the topic of Rogue Core, I'll also briefly mention that I played its closed beta before the game's launch, and that it's is flawed on a fundamental level. It strips away exactly what made DRG fun - autonomy and sparse teamplay - and replaces it with a slow, grating gameplay loop with frustrating teamplay. I heard from someone closer to the game's community than I am that DRG itself was initially supposed to be a rogue-lite like how Rogue Core is now, and if that has any truth to it, I'm very glad it didn't turn out a rogue-lite and suspect that the idea was dropped because it was retarded in the first place. Assuming that this claim is true and not just an excuse to jump on the latest normie bandwagon, of course.
Lastly, I'll touch on my more minor grievances with this game. The devs aren't very receptive to community feedback, or atleast very weakly receptive to it. It seems like GSG is sometimes heading in the right direction like with the recent (well, 'recent' - it was something like three years ago) Subata rework, but at this point I have little hope for any more quality reworks or rebalances. This isn't for lack of anything to change, by the way - the perk system has been begging for a rework for ages and some weapon choices for classes are so bad that it's a headache to use them. Some enemies like Stingtails are buggy and launch you way too far when they connect, and sometimes forgo their attack warning sound entirely. Newly added stalkers are obnoxiously loud and barely visible even under the best lighting conditions, which makes them frustrating to locate unless you have an aoe weapon. Despite being a co-op team-based game, you don't have many ways to coordinate with your team. You can shoot the bugs that are chasing your friends, of course, but you don't have any way to know what build your teammates are using without a third-party mod, which can lead to you bringing a conflicting build to the mission. Best example is driller - one of his primary weapons is a flamethrower, another is a cryo cannon. If you want to join a mission as driller when the lobby already has a driller, you're forced to gamble and hope you don't drop in with a build that will cuck your counterpart's playstyle.
Oh, and please, for the sake of your own sanity, if you take away one thing from this review, let it be this. Limit your interactions with this game's community as much as possible. Aside from the usual colourful suspects present everywhere in the game's discord, reddit, mod.io, forums, etc, even more unassuming players can't seem to help but be caught up in this sort of larper's herd mentality where they MUST ping gold chunks or mushrooms while sitting in one place for ages. If one time is funny and two times is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying, hearing 'we're rich' six million times could turn a saint into Adolf Hitler. Thankfully, this is only a problem on lower difficulties, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who stalls the game to deepthroat a yellow boulder on haz5+ or even haz5. If you do find such an anomalous ♥♥♥♥♥♥, take the rock from his hands, deposit it, and tell him that you'd prefer to be banned instead of kicked if he's too uppity. Problem solved. To give praise where it is due, the lassaiz-faire lobby browser model is actually quite nice, and prevents the game's colourful horde community from interfering with the game itself. The most you can do to a player you dislike is ban him if you're the lobby host, or choose not to play with him and disconnect if you're not. If there is a way to report a player to have him banned from all lobbies permanently, I have not found it in almost 2000 hours of play.
In short, I love this game. Which is exactly why I must give it a harsh review when it's being unfairly neglected by its own developers. Glazediver-tier shills will tell you there's nothing wrong with the game and that you must rock and stone, live in ze bunker and eat ze gold, but these are the same people that would shove a plate full of ♥♥♥♥ in their mouths if they were allowed to laserpoint it for half an hour first. I sincerely doubt Ghost Ship Games is actively malicious and hates the product of their own love and labour, more likely is that they think they can get away with more than they actually can thanks to misleading shills who love talking about the game more than actually playing it. The only way you can communicate that there's something wrong with their magnum opus which needs to be fixed - lest it dies - is by telling the devs what you don't like, not by eating it whole with its imperfections and asking for seconds when you're done.
