Part 4 (Dec 2025) · #1 of 10 in that tierWatch the moment (0:38:03)
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
- Developed by
- Funday Games
- Published by
- Ghost Ship Publishing
$12.99
DEEP ROCK GALACTIC: SURVIVOR is a single player survivor-like auto-shooter. Take on hordes of lethal aliens, mine riches, and unlock powerful upgrades to survive, as you wield the full arsenal of Deep Rock Galactic. It's one dwarf against all of Planet Hoxxes!
Consensus
B71.3/100
Steam players86.2% positiveVery Positive48,361 reviews
Metacritic ↗86/100Users: 7.2/10
VG Insights estimate ↗≈1.5M copies · ≈$11.4M gross
What creators say
Ranked May 2026 · #1 of 2 in that tierWatch the moment (0:13:45)
Ranked Sep 2026 · #1 of 10 in that tierListen to the episode
What players say
A single-player top-down survivor-like auto-shooter spun off from Deep Rock Galactic, where a dwarf fights alien hordes on Planet Hoxxes while mining minerals and escaping to a drop pod.
Players and critics rate it well: Steam sits at Very Positive (about 86% of roughly 48k reviews) and Metacritic shows a Metascore of 86 from 11 critic reviews, with PC Gamer at 90 saying it dethrones Vampire Survivors. The praise centers on polish, the DRG weapon/overclock feel and the mining-under-pressure twist. Critics and players alike flag endgame grind and balance, and the Metacritic user score is a much lower 7.2 (Mixed) (64 ratings, a small sample). It started in Early Access in Feb 2024 and hit 1.0 on Sep 17, 2025; the 1.0 gear system is the most contested change, and paid expansions (Heavy Duty, Knockout) have followed, so it is actively supported rather than abandoned.
Players love
- Polish and presentation: colorful, glowing minerals and enemies, satisfying explosions, runs well on Steam Deck up to Hazard 4
- Mining adds real risk/reward: standing still to mine valuable loot while swarmed, and digging new paths through maps
- Weapon variety with overclocks that change how a weapon behaves, plus 12 subclasses that play differently
- Optional side objectives alongside the main escort/return-to-ship goal make each run more strategic than a pure survive-the-timer loop
- Good value at $12.99; many reviewers report 50-100+ hours of play
- Carries the DRG humor and feel, so fans of the main game feel at home without needing prior experience
- Deep meta progression and lots of unlocks (weapons, classes, biomes, hazard levels) for completionists
- Hazard levels give a clear difficulty ladder; higher hazards feel tense and punish greedy decisions
Common complaints
- Weapon balance: a large share of weapons are described as weak or even harmful to have, while a few carry whole runs
- Visibility problems: isometric camera hides enemies behind terrain, the escort vehicle and crystals, and weapon effects draw over enemies, causing unseen contact damage
- Permanent upgrades are mostly small flat percentage bonuses that players feel little impact from
- Shallow in-run build variety and few synergies: many upgrades are just more damage, and many weapons (drones, beams) feel alike
- Large gaps in artifact strength push players to pick the same few upgrades every run
- Hazard 4-5 difficulty spike leans heavily on luck (the Luck stat, gear drops) and on a narrow set of meta builds
- Some bugs reported: supply pod getting stuck, freezes between levels or at launch
- Single-player only, which many reviewers (and Game8/GamingBolt) call a missed opportunity given the original's co-op identity
- Run-to-run variance is thin: the variety is pushed into the meta-progression, so a run feels much like the last (top-upvoted negative reviews, e.g. 'extracted all the run-to-run variance into its over-long meta progression')
- Steep difficulty walls between hazard levels that are cleared by hours of grinding 1% stat bumps rather than skill or strategy
Can feel tedious
- Late-game grind: one reviewer counts roughly 42 weapons x 12 classes x 5 biomes each with 5 mastery levels, meaning up to ~295 repeated missions
- Gear management chore: 12 subclasses each needing 8 items, limited inventory, risk of selling needed gear if not favorited, and mostly boring stat-stick gear
- Escort missions and the 30-second escape timer after a boss are cited as stressful or unfair
- Cheap-feeling deaths: chip damage from environmental hazards, exploding-enemy waves after bosses, enemies tuned to be just faster than mining speed
- Rare gear drops and luck-gated achievements make completion feel like rinse-and-repeat
- Early menus require clicking through several screens of locked modes and characters before the first run
What's unique
- Mining is integrated into a survivor-like: you must stand still to extract resources while enemies close in
- Escort/extraction structure: reach a randomly located ship or drop pod, with a timed escape after boss kills, rather than a fixed 30-minute survive timer
- Level-capped runs with a capped weapon loadout (max 4 weapons) and choose-one-of-three upgrades
- Overclocks that modify weapon behavior, borrowed from the main DRG game
- Gear system with randomized stats and per-subclass loadouts (12 subclasses, each with its own gear slots) layered on top of mastery progression
- Tunnel-digging that reshapes the map, which can rescue you or backfire
Players want
- Add co-op multiplayer, the most frequent request in Steam reviews
- Rebalance weapons, artifacts and underperforming classes (the Driller is named as weak)
- Streamline or reduce the meta-progression grind, e.g. let progress accrue on more than one weapon/class/biome at once
- Fix visibility: show enemies behind obstacles and stop weapon effects obscuring them
- Add tooltips for character/weapon attributes and make upgrades more build-defining with real synergies
- Add an endless mode and more late-game content or sinks for excess resources; allow separate move and aim direction (requested by one reviewer)
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
DwarfAction RoguelikeRogue-liteBullet HellTop-Down ShooterPvEArena ShooterTop-DownProcedural GenerationAction
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Tier list Part 4 (2025)
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a top-down horde-like (survivor-like) set in the Deep Rock Galactic world, with a digging-for-minerals mechanic and heavy roguelite meta-progression. He says it has an insane amount of content versus most of the genre, including four characters with subclasses that play like about sixteen, equipment, and a new payload mode. Gameplay is fairly generic and number-driven, and some weapons lack satisfying feel. He calls it one of the better ones after about 70 survivor-likes, but not top-10 material, and slots it just under Dome Keeper.
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