A stellar game that's part shooter, part Minecraft, part Alien, part Starship Troopers, part dungeon crawler, part barrel kicking simulator. Bring friends along if you really want to maximize your Rock to Stone ratio.

The word of the day is "Variety" in Deep Rock Galactic.

Four distinct classes are all a blast to play, each with a handful of weapons, each with TONS of stat-altering customization options.

My favorite is the Driller - terrain alteration with a pair of titanium drills, and crowd control with my choice between flamethrower and icethrower. Right now, my flamethrower's statted to melt bug faces as fast as possible through direct damage - but once I unlock a certain Overclock (a type of perk that can radically change how a weapon functions), I'll respec to lay down long-lasting walls of flame that char-broil anything that walks through. When I wanna chill out from that, I switch to the icethrower, and freeze solid anything that gets under my crosshairs. Or I just drop a brick of C4, or crush enemy skulls with throwing axes. Oh, did I mention that the Driller gets throwing axes as a grenade option? ♥♥♥♥♥♥' *throwing axes*, man.

The Scout can swing through caverns like Spider-Man using his grappling hook, the Engineer drops a sentry gun (or two, depending on your perk loadout) and rains down hell with a combat shotgun and a grenade launcher, and the Gunner cuts crowds of monsters to shreds with minigun fire and helps the group tank with a portable barrier.

Travel to different biomes - different regions of Hoxxes IV differentiated by color palette, natural hazards, cave layout, and in some cases, enemy type. The Radioactive Exclusion Zone features massive spires of irradiated crystal. The Fungus Bogs are riddled with noxious gases and puddles of muck. The Sandblasted Corridors are all soft sand and high winds that throw you across a room. Watch your step in the Dense Biozone and the Magma Core - one features dizzying verticality, and the other earthquakes and red-hot lava patches that can swallow you whole if you're not careful.

Speaking of enemy types? Over a dozen - some are variations on a theme, like the three Glyphid Grunts or the regional variants of Praetorians. Others live to annoy you, like Swarmers and Menaces. If the screen starts shaking, don't freak out - it's just a Bulk Detonator getting ready to say hello!

That was a really long, roundabout way of saying this game's dripping with variety. The cavern layouts randomize themselves each time you dive in, and the missions (of which there are several different types) turn over every half-hour, so you hardly ever have to worry about going on the same run twice. I haven't even gotten into the random bits of fun you have a chance of finding in the mines, like cargo crates and machine events!

As for gripes? There's a not-miniscule stretch of mid-game where things get a bit grindy. At the start, you're unlocking new weapons and new weapon upgrades and character perks, and in the game's current endgame, you've got Deep Dives - special, multi-mission-long super dives with sick loot at the end. Mid-game, though? Grind for crafting minerals to finish off your upgrade collection. Grind for brewing ingredients to unlock novelty beers on the dropship. Grind for cosmetics, grind for promotions (you need at least one to even bring a class into a Deep Dive in the first place), grind, grind, grind...

It's also kinda buggy still. Crashes are infrequent, but there's plenty of crash reports to be found on the DRG Discord server. Then little stuff like latency affecting the platforming. All kinda small, but still kind of annoying issues, which the dev team has been pretty quick to address as they pop up so far.

New content drops with each big update, bugs get patched, and the team regularly interacts with the community. What more could you ask for from a growing game?

If you're not sure, wait for a sale; but personally, I think it's well worth full price. Either way, pick it up.