I’ve played about a dozen hours of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core and I’m pretty underwhelmed by it so far. It feels very underbaked for a game that costs $30, is pulling a huge number of assets and a lot of code from a relatively polished game, and has an established studio behind it. Rogue Core fails to carry over a lot of what made the original DRG both good and unique, and fails to be a really solid roguelike.
Some thoughts:
1. It doesn’t take a lot of what made DRG good
Rogue Core loses a lot of the cooperative focus that was DRG’s best strength. The whole negotiation system for upgrades is inherently antagonistic, with each person taking from the pool available to the person after them, but more importantly the designs for the classes in Rogue Core are significantly more individualistic.
In DRG everyone has something they contribute to the team and some classes have very symbiotic relationships (Engineer and Scout mainly). These contributions are also very noticeably someone else providing something to you. Driller tunnels/bunkers, Engineer platforms, and Gunner shields are all incredibly obvious when you’re making use of them. In comparison, Rogue Core’s classes mostly provide temporary, in-combat buffs, which are much harder to notice or are much more situational. The effects are also a lot less unique to the game, feeling more like MMO buff uptimes/healing/rezzing and much less like a character is doing a specialized job. Overall it just feels more like four people are doing a mission and less like one team is.
It also feels like a lot of the more interesting enemy designs/cave events/mission activities didn’t make the jump from DRG to Rogue Core, but that feels more excusable for early access and a genre change.
2. It’s not very good at the Roguelike part
Upgrades feel lackluster on both ends, there are way too many boring upgrades and way too few build-defining ones, rare and even legendary upgrades are often just stat boosted versions of worse upgrades. The game also doesn’t use a lot of the techniques that help hide boring upgrades (shooting a rocket/bomb as a more interesting alternative to +% damage upgrades, chain lightning giving a visual effect to ricochet/area of effect type upgrades) that are common in the genre and, especially on the gun side of the game, upgrades are so same-y that they blend together. Dealing 20% more damage feels the same on every type of gun, so it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anything special out of picking it for my specific gun. Compare this to on hit effects that reward fast shooting guns, or on headshot effects that reward precise guns, or upgrades that are specific and unique to the weapon (like DRG’s overclock system, lol) which all give a much better sense that you’re doing something that is specifically synergistic or unique to the run you’re currently on.
There are also relatively few build archetypes. Melee seems like the most fleshed out archetype by far in that there are lots of upgrades that support it and those upgrades are synergistic and frequently obtainable. On the other hand elemental effects are relatively difficult to build into. There aren’t very many upgrades that provide or are related to elemental effects, and they are overly stratified. For example several elemental effects have an upgrade granting a % chance to cause that effect, and an upgrade that spreads that effect when killing a monster, or gives a buff when nearby an effected monster, but getting a matching set is fairly uncommon, and you’re much more likely to end up with a gun that does acid damage, an upgrade that spreads burning when killing a burning enemy, and an upgrade that gives bonus damage to frozen enemies providing you with no synergy whatsoever. More generic upgrades like spread any elemental effect on kill would do a lot for enabling elemental archetypes and undiluted the upgrade pool.
Rogue Core also doesn’t give any real control over your build beyond the classic pick one of three. There’s nothing like rerolling or banishing upgrades that are common ways to give control to the player in a roguelike, and it feels extra bad when you have last pick in a negotiation and are stuck with three terrible options. This is especially noticeable when going for a heavy weapon or equipment negotiation because you're likely to only see one in a run and if you get a bad one that's what you're stuck with for 30-60 minutes.
The meta progression in Rogue Core is lackluster too. Every class pulls from the same pool of upgrades, but you have to unlock slots for the upgrades for each class individually, but the currency used is earned from playing any class so you can fully upgrade a class without playing it. The whole system feels very undecided about what it wants to be and it has the same issues in run upgrades do with regards to being too generic and uninteresting. The power in the meta progression also seems to be incredibly back loaded, with actually interesting effects like reloading your unequipped weapon or large stat increases like Critical Damage 4’s 50% crit damage (which is more than Crit Dmg 1, 2, and 3 combined) being stuck at the end of the tree.
The currency itself comes from completing in-run achievements and daily/weekly missions, but the daily missions take a fairly large amount of currency to unlock in the first place, so if you spend the front loaded stuff from achievements on anything else you can hinder your overall meta progression, which doesn't feel like a great design choice.
3. Overall Quality
The whole game has a lack of polish to it that makes it feel really hard to justify the $30 price tag, especially given how much of the basic work was already done coming from Deep Rock Galactic.
-The most frequent, most important defense objective (the elevator down to the next floor) has a comically bad hitbox, which is annoying on an objective you regularly have to shoot enemies off of.
-One of the hallway setpieces pretty regularly doesn’t connect properly to the rest of cave generation
-Ziplines can hit grenades? Cooper? I'm not sure but you sure can notice the zipline firmly mounted in mid air instead of the terrain
-Weird pacing issues all over the place, like starting a solo run taking over a minute to go from spawning in to actually being in the cave system (gotta build the interruptors, pick a gun, pick a grenade)
-Also a pacing issue, picking a grenade is in a different interactable than picking a gun at the start
-Also everyone gets 40 seconds to pick an upgrade despite having had every previous person’s 40 seconds to stare at them
-Also there’s a ready check between stages immediately followed by an option to pick the upcoming floor (which could have served as the ready check)
And so much more! It just feels like a lot of fairly basic issues went overlooked in a way that might’ve been excusable for an indie company starting an Early Access title from scratch but is significantly more worrying for an established dev building off an established project. I do really want to like the game, I liked DRG and I love roguelikes, but I wouldn’t recommend it in its current state.