Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor PS5 review – a cheaper video game option

Mobile games don’t often get adapted into console and PC titles but this spin-off from Deep Rock Galactic was a real time sponge when it first appeared on smartphones.

Released six years ago, Deep Rock Galactic is a co-op first person shooter, set in mines deep underneath the surface of the planet Hoxxes IV. In teams of up to four people, players control dwarven miners, shooting onrushing hordes of aliens in mazes of destructible underground tunnels, before heading for an extraction point. Although not well known on consoles its popularity has now reached the stage where the franchise can support spin-offs.

The first of these is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, whose gameplay largely stays true to the roots of the series. That includes the fact that it’s set on Hoxxes IV, that all playable characters are dwarves, and that you need to shoot throngs of monsters; its environments are also yours to mine, blow up, and tunnel through as you see fit.

The difference is that the game is viewed from a top-down perspective and the Survivor subtitle is not an indication that it’s a survival game, but a nod to Vampire Survivors.

Like Vampire Survivors, the game plays something like a twin stick shooter, albeit where you use a single stick to move and everything else is taken care for you. That means you decide where to walk, with the game burrowing through nearby walls of rock while automatically aiming and shooting at flocks of enemies, using whatever weapons you currently have equipped.

You can acquire up to four guns at a time and while the game aims, fires, and reloads them for you, your other job is to choose amongst sets of three potential upgrades each time your miner levels up. Your choices are governed by the range of armaments you’ve managed to unlock and which dwarf you happen to be using, each coming with his own default weapon. Levelling up your guns allows you to tune their elemental damage, reload speed, firing rate, and a host of other factors.

To start with, you can only play Elimination missions, which have you hunting aliens and mining minerals, but you quickly unlock Escort, where you have to find fuel for a drilling machine, then protect it from a huge monster once it reaches its destination. There’s also Egg Hunts, where you crack open giant eggs revealing mini-bosses that you need to dispatch before you can unleash and shoot up a final boss.

As mentioned, your part in all of this boils down to steering your miner around levels and choosing which of three upgrades to plump for when levelling up. On mobile that felt perfectly fine, the bigger picture of gradual unlocks and equipment upgrades providing sufficient motivation to remain hunched over your phone. On a larger screen it’s a lot harder to ignore the incredible simplicity of your role.

The gruff, foul-mouthed, and highly repetitive exclamations of both dwarves and the game’s narrator also suffer from greater amplification. On a phone, they blended into the background. In surround sound they rapidly become grating, any comedy value soon washed away by endless noisy reiteration, like an auditory version of water torture.

It’s entirely possible that we spent too long with the mobile version, so that playing essentially the same game on a bigger screen got stale sooner than it otherwise would have. Then again, quite a lot of mobile games tend towards superficial gameplay and eternal grind, and some things just don’t translate well from one medium to another.

Your enjoyment is highly dependent on the core gameplay loop. Few would argue that the moment-to-moment action in Diablo 4 is particularly differentiated, its real draw coming from the long term upgrade process, the slow drip feed of more powerful skills and weapons proving more than enough to propel you through dungeon after dungeon, where the nature of your interaction hardly varies. It’s fair to say, though, that Diablo pulls that trick off with considerably more panache.

Some things in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor actually work better on a TV, though. For a start, you can now finally tell the difference between nitra and red sugar, the former used as an upgrade currency, while the latter recharges health. Both are represented by red crystals, which on mobile looked functionally identical. On a bigger screen it’s easy to tell which is which, making it straightforward to mine your way towards the resource of your choice.

It’s also better using a real analogue stick, rather than its touchscreen equivalent. Not that this is exactly twitch gaming, but a controller is almost always preferable to onscreen controls given the choice. Plus, there’s a huge quantity of objectives to grind your way through, which is particularly generous since the console version is the same price as it was in the App and Google Play stores, making it something of a steal, provided you’re not bored by its simplicity.

Even if you are, its opening dozen or so hours are buoyed by the rapidity of upgrades and the plentiful unlocks that see you acquiring new weapons, character classes, mission types, weapons-based challenges, and gear. The novelty of each does a good job of deflecting attention from the fact that your interaction with the game is limited to moving a single joystick. At under a tenner, that remains decent value for money.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC, iOS, and Android
Price: £9.99
Publisher: Ghost Ship
Developer: Funday Games
Release Date: 7th October 2026
Age Rating: 12

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