Risk of Rain 2 Review | Becoming an Unkillable Being is Incredibly Fun
Have you ever wanted to become powerful enough to fight god? Then this game is for you. It’s one of the best roguelites of all time and is…
Have you ever wanted to become powerful enough to fight god? Then this game is for you. It’s one of the best roguelites of all time and is every bit as addicting as you’ve ever heard it to be. It’s an incredible feat of a game and I recommend it to everyone.
It is one of the most mechanically satisfying roguelites in existence. They trim the fat to make it extremely streamlined so that you can focus on exponentially growing the amount of dopamine firing neurons in your brain. Touch down on the planet, kill stuff, collect items, kill bosses, and don’t linger for one more second. The gameplay loop is immensely satisfying. It’s so easy to sit down and play this game for 10 minutes, but then you realize your entire life has gone by and you’ve spent 40 or 90 minutes playing, and now you’re an unkillable god being. It’s incredibly fun.
You don’t get the same power fantasy in other roguelite/roguelike games. Here, your power is exponential (and occasionally linear). Items you collect stack to continue to raise the stakes of what you can do with your selected character, and how much you can resist the rain. You’re constantly hoping and looking for items that are complementary to your character's kit. And when you do, it’s just the right rush to keep you going and to keep you coming back for more.
The character selection is excellent, all of them have unique abilities that interact with items in completely different ways than other characters, which makes it easy to switch up your playstyle and keep the game feeling fresh. The art direction is superb, the soundtrack is sublime, and the enemy variety is top-notch. I’ve played the game for over 100 hours and nothing has started to wear on me.
Speaking of time, the more you put into Risk of Rain 2, the more you get out of it. At first, everything is new and mysterious, the enemies are difficult, the items quirky, and the bosses majestically powerful. But the longer you play, the more you put the pieces together. Soon you’ll know what the items do just by looking at their icons. Soon you’ll start to understand the deeply rooted lore, hidden in logs and item descriptions. It’s a vastly beautiful painting that slowly comes to form with the more time you invest. It’s an incredible experience. Not to mention, you can do all of it in a no-nonsense multiplayer co-op experience.
The achievements are what got me hooked again lately. They’re quite attainable, and for the first time in a long time, I’ve 100% a video game. One of two in my Steam library. The itch to complete them to get the additional character skills or skins was mind-bogglingly addictive.
Beyond all of this, the DLC has been top-notch. There’s been a few updates that have had major inclusions to content that have been free, and the first paid DLC came out and it was worth every penny. I can’t wait to see what else Hopoo has in store for us in the next DLC only recently announced.
My only complaint:
I would have loved it if there was a “training room” of sorts, that you could go into to test damage values and stacks of items and learn if items stack linearly or exponentially. There is the artifact of command, but that’s just not the same, and still takes time to get the resources together to test things. Beyond that, if you play with the artifact of command, there are no item tooltips to help you remember what the items are, which is difficult if you don’t see a lot of an item (especially red items). So even with my 100+ hours of experience, I’ve got the wiki open for reference. It would be nice to be able to just see all that in the game.
All in all, it’s difficult, it’s fun, and it’s infinitely replayable. Highly recommended for everyone. NameBrand.
Risk of Rain
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Originally published at https://backloggd.com.