Deep Rock Galactic - casual team [s]PvP[/s] PvE !!! shooter

[DigDog]

I've been playing quite a lot of what can be described as a "headest shooter", the likes of Vermintide; Deep Rock Galactic:

Deep Rock Galactic on Steam

Deep Rock Galactic is a 1-4 player co-op FPS featuring badass space Dwarves, 100% destructible environments, procedurally-generated caves, and endless hordes of alien monsters.

store.steampowered.com

You and 3 other stout space-dwarves set out on mining missions with varying objectives, but always swarmed by annoying bugs intent on killing you. Each player covers one of 4 roles, Gunner, Driller, Engineer, and Scout. Standard FPS controls, limited (but replenishable) ammo, light flares to light up the cave system, various gizmos such as detonation charges and defensive turrets, and a whole bunch of weird biomes, crystals, fungi, monsters, stuff that explodes, crevices, rockfalls, weather storms, etc.
Playable both solo and in team, although solo play becomes substantially harder as you go up in difficulty ratings (while being comfortably easy early on, due to you being given a bot that is far better behaved than you can wish for in a human teammate), so at some point you will need to dive in the human muck that is team play.
All missions are based in underground caves, which are entirely randomly generated, and some are quite spectacular.

pros:
really excellent art.
everything works. (i have yet to find a single glitch) good UI, good controls, runs smooth, etc.
fun, with a good character progression.

cons:
not cheap
obviously needs a headset
fairly casual early on, gets harder later on
can suck massively if you get bad teammates

Obviously a game like this - shoot your chaingun into hordes of useless enemies - is not particularly demanding as a shooter, and the majority of the fun consists of accomplishing a task with other human players. Sometime thisis great, and sometimes you get random idiots who make you wonder how they manage to breathe. But that's just the internet for you.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Years of playing L4D2 lead me to steer far away from these types of games due to the insane amount of people who either don't care about anyone else, people who insist on playing loud music through their headset, people who play FPS games with a controller (personal preference, but it was incredibly noticeable in L4D2 and they always died), or people who rage after the first thing to go wrong. I made a lot of friends playing L4D2, but it was still pretty much a guessing game whether or not you're going to have fun. It got a lot better when I found a dedicated group of people to play with regularly.

Given how many regulars we have around here, it amazes me Anandtech doesn't have a thread dedicated to playing these types of games together.

 

[JTsyo]

Not PvP, it's PvE. Played with my friends awhile back. It was a fun game. The few times I played with random people it was fine.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Not PvP, it's PvE. Played with my friends awhile back. It was a fun game. The few times I played with random people it was fine.

Vermintide is also PvE and yet, I hated playing with randoms because you'd always get one runner (someone who just sprinted to the end), one person who didn't communicate and ran off to have a one-on-one meeting with a hook rat, and the other two were left trying to hold it all together. It wasn't fun. In about 20 hours, I can't recall a single time when I had a competent party of four who wanted to actually do the objectives and/or collect all the extra items in the level. The free weekends were the closest I came to having a party that stuck together because most people were new and didn't know where to go, so I could help push them in the right direction.

 

[DigDog]

i don't know why i put PvP when i obviously wanted to write PvE. My fingers slipped, by brain farted. I did a bork.