If you're looking for something a little different to play this weekend, or are maybe just curious what a co-op space dwarf mining horde FPS is, Deep Rock Galactic is free to play for the weekend on Steam.

Deep Rock Galactic has players suiting up as one of four classes of "badass dwarven miners"—the Driller, the Engineer, the Scout, and the Gunner—who must work together to battle an onslaught of alien enemies while hauling their valuable loot out of procedurally-generated networks of caves. It went into Early Access release last year and is still there, although it's been updated numerous times since; the latest update, set to go live later this month, will add new "Deep Dive" endgame mechanics.

The free weekend on Steam runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on September 16. If you dig it (get it?), Deep Rock Galactic is also on sale for $20/£16/€18 until September 18.

Update: After a some confusion about when the free-play period ends (the announcement said Monday, the Steam page said Saturday), Ghost Ship has clarified that the free weekend ends at 1 pm PT on March 3—Sunday—while the sale price is good until March 4.

Original story: 

Deep Rock Galactic is a space dwarf mining sim co-op shooter, and if you have no idea what that means, all I can say is, welcome to the club. (It's a bit like Left 4 Dead). Fortunately for the curious among you, this weekend is the perfect time to figure it out: It's the one-year anniversary of the game's Early Access release, and so developer Ghost Ship games is making it free to play for the weekend. 

The studio also warned that the Deep Rock Galactic price will be going up in late March, from $25 to $30/£25/€28, reflecting its expanded plans for the game. The price change will have no impact on current owners or anyone who picks it up prior to the hike. 

"For the game itself, we are looking ahead once again," Ghost Ship co-founder Søren Lundgaard said. "We’ve got a lot of decisions to make and a lot of design to nail, but the headline of our deliberations is probably this: For several updates we’ve focused on stuff like upgrades for Bosco, weapon mods, backend improvements, overhauls of how we do Difficulty, and so forth—critical additions that make the game a better game—but we really wanna get back to making the caves themselves cooler now." 

The part of the process will begin in March with an update that will add new enemy types and elite variants, and more gear mods. An updated development roadmap indicates that further into the year the developers are looking at things like daily adventures, new mutators, an exploration mode, new soundtrack music, and more.

Deep Rock Galactic is free to play until March 4. It's also on sale until then for $19/£14/€17. 

It has been a bit since we peered down the mine shaft at co-op, Left 4 Dead-like shooting and mining experience Deep Rock Galactic, but it’s still chugging along (and still a pretty good game) without us. Like a vast spoil heap beside the space mines, Deep Rock just keeps accumulating features and updates, and it doesn’t seem like the developers have any intention of stopping soon. In fact, it’s clear they don’t, as a recent post lays out their intentions for an upcoming anniversary update and difficulty rework. Further, the post hints at updates and features to come later this year.

The first big change is the game’s difficulty, coming in an update to release on the 6th of February. It’s a complete reworking of the game’s difficulty from the ground up, including bug fixes and a new level, Hazard 5. That’s pretty serious, and the team expects you to need to relearn a lot. Further, the patch will add two, maybe three entirely new enemies, an upgrade system to non-weapon gear, and a Weapon Mastery feature that will let you unlock skins for your favorite guns.

Further in the future is a bit murkier, with updates scheduled for March, April, and May respectively. Some features outlined, but not confirmed, include daily adventures, new mutators, steam achievements, more new enemies and bosses, and a new mission type, among others.

You can find Deep Rock Galactic on Steam Early Access for $24.99. 

This week's update to Deep Rock Galactic, the co-op mining-themed horde shooter, was a beefy one: it added a new mission type, a new enemy and, most importantly, more beautiful beards.

The new mission type is called Salvage Operation, and involves the clean-up of a failed mining expedition. You and your party has to salvage three robots, escort them to an escape pod, repair the escape pod, and then hold off waves of enemies as it awaits blast-off. You can see it in action in the trailer above.

You'll have to contend with a new enemy called the Mactera Grabber, which will snatch you up from the floor, lift you up and then drop you, either onto some hard rocks or into a gaping chasm. The world is more dangerous, too, with new environmental hazards including blinding sand storms, wind tunnels, and red-hot, explosive magma rock. 

Now onto the important bit: beards. The update adds proper bouncy beard physics, which look especially glorious in the anti-gravity segments. But it also deepens the appearance customisation system so that you can individually tweak hair, eyebrows, sideburns, moustaches and beards, which all have new options added.

If you want the full list of changes, including buffs, nerfs, and performance fixes, then read the patch notes. 

Thanks, RPS.

Deep Rock Galactic is a co-op horde shooter where you and your friends are all dwarves trying to shoot bugs and mine ore. When we first played it last November, it felt like a tense and innovative horde shooter. When James played it last month, he found it enjoyable but thin, with plenty of room for improvement in its long-planned Steam Early Access campaign. Which is timely enough, because Deep Rock Galactic recently hit Early Access.

The current Early Access build is $25 and includes singleplayer mode, four-man multiplayer, and four dwarf classes. Developer Ghost Ship Games says they "plan to gradually raise the price" as more content is released. Immediately, the studio is focusing on: 

•  More game modes
•  More varied caves and biomes 
•  Adding tools and gear 
•  Adding character classes and class-unique gear 
•  A "deep and meaningful" meta  

Ghost Ship Games expects Deep Rock Galactic to remain in Early Access for one to two years. 

Deep Rock Galactic, the 4-player co-op mining romp through procedurally assembled cave systems, is releasing into Early Access on February 28, and though it hasn't changed much since Evan and TJ last played it, it's going to be the perfect game to grow in Steam's open-development petri dish.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: You play as one of four space dwarf classes, each with their own weapon types and navigation ability, from shooting ziplines to sprouting mushroom platforms, and spelunk like it's your job (it is), digging for a host of minerals throughout several biomes. All this, while reducing the occasional swarm of space bugs to goo and making sure not to disturb too much of the local flora and tectonic hazards. Just about everything wants you dead, and rightfully so—I mean, what are you if not a meaty, dwarf-shaped fracking injection?

When I talked to the developers at Ghost Ship Studios, they explained how shipping the Early Access build was all about getting the primary progression loop of mining, leveling your character, and upgrading gear functional. And those progression systems are pretty light touch, the upgrades to gear and weapons moving in a straight line of efficiency rather than one of diversifying behaviors—flares last longer, the pick does more damage, shotguns can hold extra rounds—while the aesthetic upgrades are made up of beards and simple color palette swaps. With a working foundation in place, the devs at Ghost Ship will spend the next several months of Early Access time increasing the stupid ways in which you can die, bless 'em. 

After a few hours with the current build, I've already fallen victim to long falls, inhalation of deadly gas via a bug corpse, and incineration via a boisterous spout of magma. I've been blasted into dwarfish pieces from an explosive chain reaction of distended mushrooms and had my head sucked off by a spot-on impression of Half-Life's ceiling-dwelling barnacles. Lucky me, I haven't killed or been killed by a teammate yet, despite the always-on friendly fire. There are a lot of ways to die, most of which are represented by the local flora and fauna of each biome, those methods multiplied by the mistakes you're guaranteed to make when the systems and variables collide. 

The procedural arrangement of these hazards, along with the disorienting, dark assembly of cave systems guarantee the first few hours of digging are full of tense experimentation and dumb accidents. Porous magma-filled bulbs that explode if irritated are often close enough to one another to guarantee a chain explosion, which, as I found out, can be used to dissolve an incoming swarm… or friend, if you're not careful. Environmental hazards are a danger to both you and the enemy, and the arc from discovery and death to using them against your foe is satisfying, though less novel with each use. Sustaining that impromptu resourcefulness should be easier once more deadly space plants are added, or whatever Ghost Ship comes up with. 

In another biome, tall, narrow plants act as an elevator, their massive leaves making for a convenient mode of transit if shot in the right spot. I used one to get out of the thick of it as the swarm overwhelmed my empty turrets. A grenade from above finished the job. It's procedural variables like these that make a good case for DRG's repetitive nature and Early Access upbringing. With so many dangerous plants, indigenous monsters, and geological phenomena in the same dwarf-miner-fantasy pot, and more on the way as the updates roll in over the year, the opportunities for serendipitous, blessed Emergent Gameplay™ increases. 

I'm a big fan of games that fill themselves with hands-off systems and let their big bag of dice spill over, the faith left with the players and basic means of interaction to make the best of it. If all your target minerals are on the ceiling of a massive, cavernous room where the floor is a minefield of magma-spewing bulbs, the walls are coated with poison-belching monsters, and the leftover space is filling with tanky space bugs—well, tough luck. Living to tell the tale is the reward. Failing might sting, but still makes for a story.

Even so, I'm growing tired of what's there. Risking your tail and stretching your ammo reserves thin to stick around for a bit more mining is a thrilling risk-reward tradeoff, and managing light as a resource as you descend further and further is fun, sure, but you'll have seen all the swarm enemies after your first big battle. And while the biomes feature different characteristics and unique hazards, they all feel far to similar right now. Waiting on DRG to inflate before buying in wouldn't hurt, though it leaves a better first impression than most of the Left 4 Dead-like games I've played. The environments are just lacking the diversity and unpredictability to keep the same caves surprising for the long haul. I really hope Ghost Ship gets inventive and cruel. 

Besides diversifying the horrible ways in which you'll die, the gear upgrades aren't very interesting and the cosmetics are too simple to feel expressive, which dulls my desire to replay missions just to grind out specific minerals. There's a lot to room to improve, but that's OK. With each batch of updates to the biomes my hope is that the journey, not the expensive-bushy-beard-cosmetic destination, becomes enough. (That's no excuse to skimp on the beard selection, though.)

As I sat inside a vehicle burrowing deep into the surface of the planet Hoxxes, a couple things tipped me off that this probably wouldn’t be a simple, in-and-out resource extraction job. They’d sent my dwarf in with a gatling gun, a tool which doesn’t have many traditional uses in mining. Sure enough, Deep Rock Galactic is as much about blasting away a variety of hostile bugs with your friends as it is about collecting valuable ore from its randomly-generated, voxel-based levels.

Balancing your team’s attention and resources between extracting ore and killing off waves of enemies is what makes Deep Rock engaging, and sets it apart from other horde shooters. There are also lots of interesting ways to use the terrain to your advantage due to the sculptability of the game's alien caves, such as digging out a horizontal tunnel to retreat into and placing a gun turret at the entrance. 

However, I never felt I was in much of a rush to get the mining portion done, which led to a lot of missions where it made sense for everyone to focus on combat until the creepy crawlies were thinned out, then mine in the lull between waves. Creating more pressure to pursue both objectives at once would definitely ramp up the tension and improve the interplay between the two systems.

In the spectrum of Early Access games, Deep Rock is very early at the moment. Most of the central hub from which you’ll launch missions is locked off beyond force fields with enticing names like “Hangar” and “Treasure Vault.” Some of the geometry and textures seem like placeholders. Some of the machinery doesn’t even have collision enabled yet, and many other objects have hilariously bugged physics. But since there’s really nothing to do between missions so far, you won’t be spending a lot of time there anyway.

The caves are dark and atmospheric, rich with veins of three different ores. As the layouts and geometry are randomly generated, each delve has a genuine feeling of exploration and fear of the unknown attached. The grinding, echoing sounds of the insertion drill and that first leap into almost total darkness go a long way toward enhancing this. 

Within, you'll be attacked by special waves of enemies or larger boss monsters to challenge your adaptability and teamwork. While battling everything from ankle-biting swarmers and massive behemoths that can only be damaged by shooting them from behind, I was impressed by the use of light to shape the tactical environment. The mines are dark enough to be disorienting, and each dwarf has a limited stash of flares that can be used to illuminate a battlefield or light up a large chamber to locate ore. They fizzle out after a certain amount of time, and maintaining visibility is an objective you can’t really afford to ignore.

Other than the ability to create light, the four playable dwarves are pretty different. The Gunner is armed with a gatling gun and can dish out the most damage at the cost of somewhat limited mobility—though he can deploy a persistent zipline that allows quick travel between any two anchor points. The Driller has two, massive mining drills for hands and can burrow through even the sturdiest stone very quickly, making him a master of reaching difficult ore veins and punching through into new caverns. He also has access to a flamethrower, which is great for dealing with swarms of small enemies. 

The Scout comes with a shotgun and a grappling hook, making him the most mobile class. But more importantly, his flares last longer and can adhere to surfaces instead of just bouncing around, which makes him invaluable for maintaining visibility. Finally, the Engineer can place elevated platforms and sentry turrets, both of which are life savers when facing large hordes. Of these, the Driller felt the most novel, as his greatest utility is being able to shape the environment itself. Creating strong positions out of the voxel bedrock or facilitating a quick escape by carving a new path to an extraction zone always felt like a useful contribution to my team’s success.

At this early stage, Deep Rock Galactic is an innovative, tense horde shooter. But there just isn’t much to interact with outside its missions, and prolonging a dig just to collect a bit more gold and be rewarded with a bit more XP therefore feels like a hollow incentive at this stage. When the home base layer is more fleshed out, I’ll be interested to see what kind of progression and rewards will be dangled in front of me to encourage digging greedily and deep.

The devs also have plans for more cave “biomes,” more mission types, and have even hinted at more enemy genuses beyond the Glyphid insects we’ve seen so far. All of this would be welcome, as a game about exploring the dark depths is likely to lose some luster if there aren’t enough different experiences to uncover. Already, I’ve seen some pretty cool environments, including a large, vertical chamber with a gushing flame geyser. The more of that, the better.

Deep Rock Galactic is running an open beta on PC from Thursday, Nov. 9 to Sunday, Nov. 12. Sign up before Nov. 6 at deeprockgalactic.com

I'm only one day into PAX West 2017, but I can already tell that Deep Rock Galactic will be one of the best things I see in Seattle. Currently in closed alpha, Ghost Ship Games' FPS takes the 'get to the chopper' setup of Left 4 Dead and imprints it onto colorful, procedurally-generated alien caves.

You're four resourceful dwarves sent by Deep Rock Galactic to mine dangerous worlds for resources. Once you touch down, your team clambers through ragged, polygonal tunnels and rooms in search of a valuable ore called Morkite. Other precious metals populate the caves too, which can be pickaxed to purchase deployable turrets or call in supply drops, the only way I saw to replenish ammo. Accompanying you is a robotic storage unit that you empty the ore into.

What I like most about Deep Rock is how evenly it balances exploration and combat. I wasn't fighting constantly. The alien spiders came in waves, often with a warning given before their arrival, not unlike L4D's crescendo events. Between combats, we had to solve some simple physical problems in order to navigate the caves: laying ziplines to get across crevices, using a 'platform gun' to build steps to ore embedded high on a wall, or using one character's giant drills to deform the subterranean terrain. It's always a good sign when a game that relies on procedural generation has a sense of pacing.

Deep Rock Galactic should go into Early Access in the first quarter of 2018, and it'll be interesting to see how Ghost Ship expands on the good foundation it's laid so far. Right now there's only one mission type (get in, get the Morkite, get out), and in the video above game director Mikkel Martin Pedersen sheds some light on other objectives they're considering, like a rescue mission, or an attempt to fight your way through a facility that's overrun with enemies.