Dredge: The Iron Rig
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Critic Reviews for Dredge: The Iron Rig
I fell in love with Dredge all over again while playing The Iron Rig. It completes the game in a way I never thought I needed and makes it feel brand new. Every point that the base game made about humanityâs impact on the world and the unknown implications fromâŠwell, the unknown, is heightened by the DLC. Itâs the perfect reason to replay, a fantastic excuse to stay in bed all weekend and play a cozy horror game, and a new way to make yourself wonder about whatâs lurking out of sight the next time you look out at the vastness of the ocean.
Overall, if youâre looking for more Dredge, or a reason to delve back into the game for the first time since The Pale Reach, The Iron Rig more than likely has at least a weekend worth of fun to offer you. Even if it feels in places like it could have been a bit more than just another fish added to the catch of a good and spooky net.
DREDGE: The Iron Rig is a nice excuse to get back onto that eerie ocean, but if you've already completed the game it's a bit lacking in danger.
The Iron Rig DLC offers that trademark DREDGE spookery, a myriad of new tools, and shoals of extra species to lengthen the overall experience. This new tale isnât as well told as The Pale Reach, but the extra gameplay content is much broader in scope, encouraging me to even polish off quests from the main game that I had previously consigned to the deep. If âmore of the sameâ makes you want to pull your waders on one more time then you wonât be disappointed, but players expecting vast new experiences may want to give it a miss.
In the end, the thing The Iron Rig does that the game really needed was breathing new life into the endgame of Dredge.
The Iron Rig is a great addition to Dredge, but going any further would be scraping the rotting guts from the bottom of the barrel. The second piece of DLC already reminds me of the Lazarus taxon that Ironhaven Corpâs scientist explained to me early on; it raises a seemingly extinct game from the dead and gives it life once more. I loved my time with the DLC and binged The Iron Rig over the course of a day in a way that I rarely do with games any more, but the game itself offers a warning to developer Black Salt Games: drilling too greedily and too deep can have devastating consequences.
