Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

I've put 20 hour into in on Xbox Live. It's okay. It's a grindfest, but it''s not interesting enough to be a grindfest. "Infinite Build Options" is a pretty big lie. The item economy is a terrible thing to base your game around. You'll spend 25 minutes doing one map to get 1 mediocre item and 3 you're gonna salvage. The static upgrades are ridiculously expensive. You shouldn't have to play 60 hours of half a game to finally have enough variety to keep you somewhat interested. The 4 characters aren't really different enough from eachother. The only reason to swap between them is because some weapons are locked to a character. If you want to spend 25 minutes for a 1.5-2% upgrade, this this is your game.

Well polished but maybe one of the worst games in the genre. You have stunningly little agency, there are a bunch of systems but none of them give you any real depth to make choices as a player. It's basically just a stat grinding simulator with what seems to be escalating grind times for each wall. It's unfortunate because the game is extremely well polished overall, but a survivor game needs to be the right combination of brainless grind and learning what to exploit, and this game is basically all grind.

Perhaps 20 hours isn't enough, but this game feels so slow on progression. I can barely complete a hazard 2 mission and have to rely on "just the right amount" of luck to get the upgrades needed in a run. It feels like working towards mastery progression is the answer from what I've seen online, but it after upgrading multiple times on that front, I didn't feel much of a difference in power and still struggle on the exact same missions. Based on this, I find it difficult to stay motivated to progress since power increments feel meaningless and therefore "the grind" rears its ugly head. I compare this with Vampire Survivors and Halls of Torment where I actually feel measurably stronger after a few runs and can move on to more difficult levels in what I feel is a reasonable time frame. "just use cold weapons", "just use this class", "just build this way"--- no thanks. I don't want to be pigeonholed into a specific play-style I don't resonate with.