DRG: Survivor is a dangerously addictive mutation of the survivor genre, newly unleashed upon Early Access. It is a progression beyond the state of the art and is yet another necessary game here in the first few short months of the year.

I didn't like the NextFest demo of DRG: Survivor because I'm annoying about Deep Rock Galactic. Super annoying; annoying enough to require a superlative. Like

- Sherlock Holmes

- Artificial Intelligence, and

- The Two "Aliens" Films,

almost two hundred hours of DRG gameplay beginning in Early Access has made me an incredibly frustrating person to talk to about literally anything else. You wanna talk about spontaneous fermentation? Tough shit. Actually, that should probably be on the list.

For me, Deep Rock Galactic is a lot of things - the gold standard of community listening and ongoing support, a diverse, unbeatable set of gameplay loops, a baller soundtrack, I mean, I don't know. It's basically perfect. The main thing it is, though: a multiplayer game. Everything I mentioned above is something you can share. That was sort of a baseline "brand" consideration for me. Well, it turns out that all the rest of that world-class stuff is pretty good by itself.

A lot of the arc of a round is the survivor stuff you might already like, with the addition of an environment that you can dig through, shape, and use. Then it layers on classes that strike the mechanics in interesting ways. It's pure space-drugs, even if you can't bring a friend.

(CW)TB out.