I don't play too many rougelikes but I vibed with this one more than I expected. I think the major reasons are due to the larger levels, long-term decision making and multiple playstyles all centering around positioning and crowd control in different ways.
The increasing difficulty over time really ties the game together in a lot of ways. Throughout each run, players are constantly forced to pick between efficiency and safety. Killing enemies grants players gold that allows them to interact with chests, shrines, and shops that act as glorified item dispensers, but killing enemies for gold takes time that players could be using to find a teleporter that functions as both the level exit and the boss.
The player can only use the teleporter to move on after the boss has been defeated and 90 seconds have passed. One might be tempted to activate it early and scour the rest of the level while the timer ticks down, but this has its own sets of consequences between the drastically increased enemy spawns and the boss also causing trouble. (bonus points if it has universal attacks) At the same time, enemy spawns are decreased after the timer ticks down, which can allow the player to camp out the chaos if things get too overwhelming at the cost of taking more time and increasing the difficulty long-term.
This gets even better with the variety of characters the game has on offer, with each offering a different way to manage the game's often overwhelming crowds. A few standouts involve the Huntress kiting with her arrows, the Sniper using their immense mobility to position themselves for deadly horizontal shots, the Engineer using autonomous entities such as turrets and mines to control space, and Acrid using various damage over time sources to chip away at crowds over time.
If I had to criticize the game, some areas where you dump money don't allow you to make overly informed decisions (i.e. grey chests, some shrines, the colored chests are really good though) and I'm not sure how I feel about random proc effects. Though they are undeniably helpful, them being random makes me less likely to actively strategize around them and instead be another mindless addition to my basic attack. To my knowledge it also unfairly favors faster-firing weapons. I might turn around on this the more I learn the game though. Ancient Valley is also a really unfun map, it has too much verticality navigated with ropes and as a result it's much harder to plan out navigation or reliably interpret what of it you have left to explore.
Overall, the core of Risk of Rain Returns is a game that constantly asks you to balance the short-term with the long-term, and that alone makes it really engaging to play. Would recommend to anyone who likes roguelikes.
The increasing difficulty over time really ties the game together in a lot of ways. Throughout each run, players are constantly forced to pick between efficiency and safety. Killing enemies grants players gold that allows them to interact with chests, shrines, and shops that act as glorified item dispensers, but killing enemies for gold takes time that players could be using to find a teleporter that functions as both the level exit and the boss.
The player can only use the teleporter to move on after the boss has been defeated and 90 seconds have passed. One might be tempted to activate it early and scour the rest of the level while the timer ticks down, but this has its own sets of consequences between the drastically increased enemy spawns and the boss also causing trouble. (bonus points if it has universal attacks) At the same time, enemy spawns are decreased after the timer ticks down, which can allow the player to camp out the chaos if things get too overwhelming at the cost of taking more time and increasing the difficulty long-term.
This gets even better with the variety of characters the game has on offer, with each offering a different way to manage the game's often overwhelming crowds. A few standouts involve the Huntress kiting with her arrows, the Sniper using their immense mobility to position themselves for deadly horizontal shots, the Engineer using autonomous entities such as turrets and mines to control space, and Acrid using various damage over time sources to chip away at crowds over time.
If I had to criticize the game, some areas where you dump money don't allow you to make overly informed decisions (i.e. grey chests, some shrines, the colored chests are really good though) and I'm not sure how I feel about random proc effects. Though they are undeniably helpful, them being random makes me less likely to actively strategize around them and instead be another mindless addition to my basic attack. To my knowledge it also unfairly favors faster-firing weapons. I might turn around on this the more I learn the game though. Ancient Valley is also a really unfun map, it has too much verticality navigated with ropes and as a result it's much harder to plan out navigation or reliably interpret what of it you have left to explore.
Overall, the core of Risk of Rain Returns is a game that constantly asks you to balance the short-term with the long-term, and that alone makes it really engaging to play. Would recommend to anyone who likes roguelikes.