Every time I come back to this game I have a blast with it, but I really only find myself coming back to it for a round or two every couple of months. The game has a lot of things that really make it click and a lot of elements that really... don't. Oftentimes they're the same features!

Risk of Rain 2 is really good at producing those runs that would be really memorable in any other roguelike - the ones where it feels like RNG has made everything come together. You've got a coherent build, the random elements have mainly been on your side and now you stroll through the levels completely uninhibited, a walking god. My primary issue with Risk of Rain 2 is that these are just... too easy to get?

Given that just by surviving you'll get new items that make you stronger, the difficulty of any given run tapers off pretty hard. Even playing on the highest difficulty (Monsoon, the one available in standard game modes) doesn't do a whole hell of a lot to change this, with the first ten minutes still being that same waiting game to see whether you get wiped, or if you live long enough to get items. After this point, it's possible to die if the game ratfucks you by spawning enough of a couple particularly annoying enemy types, but given a few runs and enough knowledge of the monsters, your run is more likely to end when everyone in the party is able to one-shot the entire screen with a single mouse click, with everyone sitting down to decide "should we one-shot the final boss now, or wait another loop?"

It never really feels like there's a middle ground where you're just scraping by - unless you're playing with friends. If you die, your friends can revive you by beating the level, which means you've missed out on an entire stage worth of items and are more likely to die in the upcoming stage, thus repeating the cycle until you're just repeatedly getting one-shot by the one enemy your friends weren't able to wipe out with AoE attacks. Frankly I wish there were a more multiplayer-friendly character, a more support-oriented class. Yes, it would be less optimal than just pumping out damage, but currently the only Survivor who can really protect allies is the Engineer, and that's not really an active decision on their part. I want something that can enable the group I'm playing with to have fun.

Side note: Yes, you can play with Artifacts on - big gameplay modifiers that are typically presented as a tradeoff (enemies drop items, but chests no longer spawn, etc), but in my experience you will never get a party of people to agree on this since everyone has a love/hate relationship with each individual Artifact (except for the purist, who hates all Artifacts).

Looking back over what I've written so far, it sounds far more negative than the 9/10 I've currently given this game. But I think both the rating and what I've said so far accurately represent my feelings about this game: this game is great when things are going well, but there are so many ways that fun can be soured - die too early, die too often in multiplayer, get your ass cooked by 40 elder lemurians at once, die because you picked up too many movespeed items, or reach the point where you can one-shot your entire screen (which, admittedly, is fun for a little while in the same way that enabling cheats is in any other game). There are so many ways this game can suck. As mentioned before, though, if you can stop yourself from dying early and survive long enough to get a few items, steadily ramping up your power to ludicrous levels is so gratifying despite being far easier to do here than in any other roguelite I've played.

If you have any interest in roguelites and aren't turned off by this one being a shooter, give it a shot. Playing with friends might help you get into this game, but if you're having an awful time due to some of the elements listed above, I'd suggest playing on your own and looking up how to unlock some of the other characters since the ones you start with have (in my opinion) some of the least satisfying gameplay hooks of any of them. Try not to take too long looting each stage once you've found the teleporter - the difficulty constantly ticks up as time goes on and spending too long looking for items is a deathtrap, especially on higher difficulties.

Reviewed on Mar 13, 2022


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