Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead in Deep Rock Galactic

Minecraft was obviously immensely successful with its concept of spelunking, fighting monsters, and then mining the resources they were guarding. Deep Rock Galactic is an upcoming Early Access title that takes this concept, puts you in space, gives you a squad of four dwarves, and hands you guns. At the Nordic Game Conference we had a quick chat with Søren Lundgaard from developer Ghost Ship Games about the upcoming title.

"There is this premise that the Deep Rock Galactic company have found this very dangerous planet and everybody else, all the other mining companies, have run away with their tails between their legs, it's too dangerous for them. But Deep Rock Galactic, they go where nobody else goes, they send in the really hardcore dwarves and try to find the minerals down there," he explained.

Søren goes on to explain how there's four classes: Scout, which can use the flare gun to light up the caves with the dynamic lighting system; Driller, that can drill and tunnel through the terrain; Gunner, who has a huge Gatling gun to protect the squad, and Engineer, that can set up sentry guns and platforms. You can also combine those roles in any way, so if you want two Scouts and two Gunners, then you can.

He goes on to explain that the final release of the game will have a multitude of enemy types, along with plenty of biomes such as ice caves, luscious caves, lava caves, etc. "We want more monster types, like monsters that take advantage of the environment they have, such as monsters that dig through the caves, or ones that hate light, try to take in some of the game mechanics that we have and apply that to the monster types as well," he said.

Deep Rock Galactic is currently in closed alpha and you can apply access via the game's Steam page. There's no confirmed release date but expect it this year in early access, and console versions eventually. Could this be just as addictive as Minecraft?