42,176 concurrent players on launch day. #2 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. And a Steam Community thread titled “59% mixed reviews on launch, good job guys! #EARLYACCESSCOPING.”

Ghost Ship Games launched Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core into Early Access on May 20, 2026. The commercial picture is strong: $29.99 at launch, near the top of Steam, over 20,800 players still in the mines as of May 21. The community response tells a different story. Steam reports 71% positive from 2,239 reviews — “Mostly Positive” in Valve’s classification. According to SteamDB data, the score has since slid to approximately 64% across nearly 3,000 reviews. One bad day from “Mixed.”

What Made DRG Special

The original Deep Rock Galactic spent eight years earning its reputation as one of the finest co-op shooters on PC. Four distinct dwarf classes, each with unique traversal tools — ziplines, platform guns, handheld drills — navigating procedurally generated caves where exploration and collaborative problem-solving took priority over shooting. As PC Gamer noted, DRG “looks like a conventional co-op shooter but doesn’t really play like one.”

Rogue Core keeps the dwarves, the caves, and the space station hub where you get drunk before missions. It changes almost everything else about how the game actually plays. It’s a roguelite: pick a class, race through mine levels, defend an elevator between stages, and repeat until a boss fight. Upgrades are chosen mid-run, resources are mined on the fly, and a rising threat meter punishes dawdling. The caves are more navigable, so traversal tools feel less essential. Enemies are faster, tougher, and more aggressive. The relaxed, explore-at-your-own-pace rhythm that defined DRG is simply gone.

PC Gamer’s assessment: Deep Rock’s developers have “reverse-engineered their one-of-a-kind co-op game into a far more conventional shooter.”

Reading the Room

The top negative Steam review, from a player with 2.2 hours: “Yeah… Even i cannot recomend that one… It feels… Wrong… Like it’s no longer DRG that i fell in love with…”

The top positive review, at 3.1 hours: “needs work but i like it”

That gap — between heartbreak and cautious tolerance — defines Rogue Core’s launch. There is no wave of enthusiasm here. One thoughtful positive review flags concerns that the cooperative perk system, where upgrades are chosen as a team, will create “bad blood between fanatics / child like players.” Another wishes for class-based weapon trees like DRG: Survivor instead of the shared upgrade pool.

Rock Paper Shotgun is the warmest critical voice, praising Rogue Core for carving out “its own subterranean space” and highlighting the team-focused upgrade system. Game director Mikkel Martin Pederson described the approach as an expansion of roguelike convention — instead of creating a build for yourself, everyone collaboratively creates a build for the team. But even that positive piece hedges on whether Rogue Core will replace the original for regular co-op nights.

The upgrade design draws consistent fire from both critics and players. Where the best roguelites — Risk of Rain 2, Hades — overwhelm players with chaotic, game-breaking power combinations, Rogue Core offers “+25 base health” and “+5% reload speed.” PC Gamer notes the system seems “geared around the fear that players will run out of things to do too quickly” — cautious balance where the genre demands excess. The memorable runs are exceptions: a gun that chains electric damage between enemies, a random upgrade that makes electrified targets explode. The rest is incremental. The guns themselves are satisfying to shoot — years of DRG development refined the hit feedback — but you don’t build a specialized arsenal. You pick a random gun from a locker at the start of each run.

The Early Access Gamble

Ghost Ship can reasonably invoke the Early Access label. This is day one. The studio’s eight-year track record with DRG — free content updates, community stewardship, no predatory monetization — earns genuine credibility. Systems will be added, balanced, and iterated on.

But the Early Access shield has edges. Players paid $29.99. The review trajectory is heading south, not stabilizing. And the loudest criticisms — the game feels conventional, upgrades are timid, the magic is gone — aren’t bugs to patch. They’re structural design decisions baked into a genre shift. You can tune a weapon’s damage. You can’t patch a roguelite into an exploration game.

This is a different beast from the Civilization VII backlash making the rounds this week. Firaxis is iterating on a beloved formula; Ghost Ship is asking fans of a cooperative exploration game to embrace a roguelite — different genre, different rhythms, different relationship with repetition. That’s a bold bet, and 42,000 players showed up on day one to take it.

Whether they stay depends on how much of the old magic Ghost Ship can excavate from a fundamentally new kind of cave.

Sources