In the dwarven caste system of Deep Rock Galactic, the Reclaimers are the elite of the elite, too skilled to waste their talents and training on mining. Except, well, they're still dwarves, which means any trip into the depths of new Deep Rock spin-off Rogue Core will still see you breaking out the pickaxe to chip away at minerals here and there between shooting waves of monsters.

Being the mining company's equivalent of a Navy SEALs actually seems like kind of a bad deal. Shooting monsters is fun and all, but humans, Protoss, every species has a squad of gun-toting toughs who've raced against the clock to take down a boss before time runs out. It's the miner dwarves doing an honest day's work who really have it made. Who else gets to pop into the mines for a 10-minute egg hunt one day, then on the next establish a mining facility with a network of pipes snaking through tunnels dug by their own hand? When that gets stale, there's always a drilldozer to escort or mining robots to find and repair.

That's my roundabout way of saying that the real treat of Deep Rock Galactic, still going strong after eight years, is that it looks like a conventional co-op shooter but doesn't really play like one. Exploration and collaborative problem-solving using each dwarven class's unique utilities (a zipline, a platform gun, a big ol' set of drills) take priority over killing enemies, and its many updates over the years cemented it as the co-op FPS to play if you always fancied capture the flag over team deathmatch.

With Rogue Core, Deep Rock's developers have reverse-engineered their one-of-a-kind co-op game into a far more conventional shooter. Rogue Core is polished, competent, and a good time with a couple buddies in a Discord chat, but samey runs and a drip feed of modest upgrades don't give it the dramatic peaks of my favorite roguelikes.

Here's the gist of Rogue Core's structure:

• Pick one of five classes and fill in your unlockable enhancement slots with perks like "+25 base health" and "+5% reload speed"
• Pick a mission, which at least from what I've seen so far is always the same mission: race through a mine, call the elevator, defend it, and repeat until you reach the same boss fight at the end
• Mine the resource that allows you to level up your gear mid-run as efficiently as possible, while occasionally veering off to a side objective that will probably reward you more of that resource, or an upgrade that ends up feeling a bit more substantial
• Return to the hub, collect your bonus points for achievements like "downloading data from six terminals" and use those to unlock more minor upgrades

In theory, I like the ways Rogue Core's developers have tried to encourage teamwork. When you collectively mine enough of the neon green upgrade crystal, expenite, everyone has to gather together to take turns picking from a random array of perks, jockeying over who should get a rare or epic option. A few classes have abilities that deploy around them—I've mostly been playing as the Falconer, who can pop down a bubble that makes my allies deal electric damage for 15 seconds. The Guardian can drop a zone that restores armor, critical for surviving big enemy waves.

Using those abilities effectively requires being more locked in to exactly where your teammates are and what they're doing than I think this style of hangout co-op game is really geared towards, which is why I had the most fun with Rogue Core's Retcon class. Her main ability lets you rewind time for yourself, reversing damage you've recently accrued, with a complementary ability that makes you hit harder the more damage you take. At no point does this require me asking my teammates to come stand inside a circle.

More expenite, more problems

The process of picking upgrades as a team is also not entirely a slam dunk, both because it feels like it slows down the game—everything pauses once you launch the upgrade menu together—and because the upgrades are often a bit underwhelming. A buff to crit chance, 10% improved cooldown, that sort of thing. There are more exciting ones, but so far the Rogue Core runs that have handed me a gun that chains electric damage from one enemy to another, and a random upgrade that makes electrified enemies explode, feel more like the exception than the expectation.

The power scaling (both of the upgrades Rogue Core throws at you in a run and in its meta progression) seem geared around the fear that players will run out of things to do too quickly and start pounding the Steam review score in frustration. Each class has a "bio booster deck"—because every roguelite is required by law to use cards somehow!—but they aren't customizable until you've "ascended" two max level classes, which will take many hours of play.

There are a bunch of guns, but unlike in loot-based games like Darktide, you don't get to build up a specialized arsenal in Rogue Core and dedicate resources to speccing it out, or choose to shape a build around it. You just pick a random gun from the equipment locker at the start of a run. The guns that are there are quite fun to shoot, some chunky and some pingy with hit feedback refined from years of Deep Rock development. There are a bunch of elemental attributes that are as exciting as they are in any game—I love freezing a whole pile of skittering monsters with a perfectly lobbed cryo grenade.

Moment-to-moment it's pleasant, and sometimes even hectic and exciting when you run up against the mission timer and have to race to the elevator. But Rogue Core seems to take it for granted that I'll want to play the same exact mission dozens and dozens of times, and is using the structure of a roguelite to simply dole out tiny incremental rewards for doing so. It locks down many of the interactive side objectives in the mines until your character is higher level, denying early runs from the spice a little extra variety would give them.

The other way to design a roguelite, the Risk of Rain 2 way, is to shower the player with power-ups that embrace the chaotic potential of wildly imbalanced builds. You stack and you stack and you stack. You rarely slow down to pick between three, because you'll likely end a run with so many items that you're playing your character in an entirely different way by the end of a run than when you began it.

Deep Rock Galactic doesn't need that sort of exponential power fantasy, because the missions are short, each dwarf has a distinct role to fill, and fending off enemies is more about survival than sadism. Rogue Core, at least in its early access launch, doesn't have that clarity of purpose, leaving its Reclaimers stuck with a bit of a ho-hum life.

If they're really the elite of the elite, they deserve an arsenal with the child safety locks turned off.