Bought and played this game after falling in love with Risk of Rain 2, and it really feels like this game lacks everything that makes that game special, sprinkled with annoying mechanics that really just made this game a negative experience for me. To list a few examples:
- Having to kill all enemies before teleporting is annoying
- The camera being so zoomed out makes movement feel slow and platforming feel awkward. The awkward platforming exacerbates the above problem when enemies are very spread out through a level.
- For some reason I thought that levels in RoR2 were static due to it moving to 3d and expected RoR1 to have procedural levels. While there are some random elements, stages remain mostly static which adds to my boredom when attempting many runs.
- Related to the above issue. Despite levels being handcrafted, most of them feel barren and lack any personality, especially when compared to the stages in RoR2.
- Not sure if I was doing something wrong but the game feels much more hard than RoR2 such that every run feels like its slowly drowning in mediocrity before you eventually get swarmed by too many enemies and die. When time = difficulty, getting bad item RNG not only punishes the player by not rewarding them, but punishes them by making it so that every further enemy encounter takes more time due to lack of DPS, creating a negative feedback loop that is just unfun to play. While this is technically an issue that is present in RoR2, that game gives players much more agency over their builds via the scrapper, 3d printers, and the cauldrons in the bazaar. When you get bad items in RoR2, those items become fuel for good items in the future. When you get bad items in RoR1, you get to hide in a corner of the map and get fucked for the rest of your run.
Still looking forward to RoR returns though. Just praying the game feels like the 2D RoR2 that I was hoping for when I bought this game, rather than the mess that I actually played.
- Having to kill all enemies before teleporting is annoying
- The camera being so zoomed out makes movement feel slow and platforming feel awkward. The awkward platforming exacerbates the above problem when enemies are very spread out through a level.
- For some reason I thought that levels in RoR2 were static due to it moving to 3d and expected RoR1 to have procedural levels. While there are some random elements, stages remain mostly static which adds to my boredom when attempting many runs.
- Related to the above issue. Despite levels being handcrafted, most of them feel barren and lack any personality, especially when compared to the stages in RoR2.
- Not sure if I was doing something wrong but the game feels much more hard than RoR2 such that every run feels like its slowly drowning in mediocrity before you eventually get swarmed by too many enemies and die. When time = difficulty, getting bad item RNG not only punishes the player by not rewarding them, but punishes them by making it so that every further enemy encounter takes more time due to lack of DPS, creating a negative feedback loop that is just unfun to play. While this is technically an issue that is present in RoR2, that game gives players much more agency over their builds via the scrapper, 3d printers, and the cauldrons in the bazaar. When you get bad items in RoR2, those items become fuel for good items in the future. When you get bad items in RoR1, you get to hide in a corner of the map and get fucked for the rest of your run.
Still looking forward to RoR returns though. Just praying the game feels like the 2D RoR2 that I was hoping for when I bought this game, rather than the mess that I actually played.