Risk of Rain 2

*TL;DR: Nothing has tooltips and the gameplay is basically just button spamming and collecting drops.* Putting the Gearbox and privacy situation aside, I surprisingly found this game pretty boring and beginner-unfriendly. 

First and most grievous in my opinion is that not A SINGLE ITEM has a tooltip. Items are basically all your upgrades. At first this isn't an issue because most items come from chests which are random anyway. But then there will be stations where you can buy an item from a list of other items, but you can only buy one item and you basically have no idea what any of the items do. Apparently the items used to have colored outlines which showed their rarity, but this feature was removed at least for items in the shop stations, which is weird because thats when knowing what the item is actually matters. There's also trading stations where you can trade an item you have for another, but again, you have no idea wtf you're trading for the first time you play. Once you get an item it's recorded in your logbook, which you open by pausing and selecting it. And if you ever forget what an item does? Yeah, you have to open the pause menu, go to the logbook, and search for the item from the list instead of just hovering over the tooltip like a lot of other roguelites implement. I don't know if "no tooltip" is a thing in other games other than Binding of Isaac, but it does not feel good in this game. Before an update you couldn't even open the logbook during a run. 

Second: environments are bland in the way that there's no variety in them, despite there being different biomes. Monsters don't look interesting or varied. This is especially annoying when you're trying to search for a teleporter and you're basically walking around in circles because everything looks the same. 

Third: gameplay is spammy and dull, your goal is basically to just kill monster hordes. it's like those zombie games in fortnite or a wow-like mmo where you just hold trigger and click something whenever your cooldowns are off. 

Fourth: the effects on screen get really intense really quickly. To the point that you can't even see enemy attack alerts. And if it's a boss, you can get caught off-guard really bad.

 Fifth, and I know this is more of me being dumb, but my first run I spawned next to a blood alter. The blood alter's icon was shaped a little bit like a teleporter and it has the exact same color, and that combined with the fact my first task was "find a teleporter," I thought the blood alter was the teleporter. When it didn't do anything teleporty the first time I interacted with it I thought maybe it was some special thing where I had to interact with it enough times and it would turn into a teleporter (like basically an alter that always spawned closed by where you could sacrifice your health to get a teleporter more quickly, instead of searching for one out far). This was not the case and I didnt die, but the fact that teleporters and blood alters don't have different colors (and more differently shaped icons) doesn't make much sense to me. 

Sixth, character build doesn't seem to matter and is too dependent on RNG. You just open as many chests you can find and get whatever item it gives you, with the goal of getting the Most Items and the occasional shop/trading station. Usually I like hack-and-slash games, and roguelites, but something about this game is almost too simple for me. I think it may have to do with lack of needing positioning (enemies just charge at you the same way). If there's a something deeper than that that I'm missing because I haven't played much, then that's my mistake. But this game really does not have that initial hook or addiction like other roguelites do that I've played (Hades, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Gungeon, Dead Cells, freaking Splatoon 3 Side Order, etc). 

I haven't played RoR 1 but I can definitely see this as a game that works for 2D but not for 3D. The good: I like how items appear on your character. 

Wow what a nice glow up for the sequel. Very impressive to jump from a simple 2D game to a full on 3D game that actually feels quite good.

Damn I’ve had some good runs end tragically quick. I find it hard to tell sometimes when I’m getting damaged with all the chaos going on.  Fun game though. I’ll definitely keep playing till I beat it once, probably with a few different characters. 

Damnit! Again I had a great run that ended in an instant. I’m enjoying risk of rain 2. It’s good not great. My favourite roguelites have some player choice in how to make your build. This one doesn’t have that. It’s just random. It’s still fun and I’m determined to win it at least with one character, hopefully more but we will see.

I beat what I thought was the final stage with what I thought was an unreal build. A ton of damage reduction. A good amount of turrets and beetles. A good number of items in general and the fucking giant gold guy who helps during teleporter battles. Then after beating the stage I realize there is another stage and I died on the way to the boss. So tragic. I was upset. I considered calling it quits. Fuck me that was a painfully close hour long run. One thing I’ll say about risk of rain 2 is that I always need a break after a long run. I feel defeated. I think I need to try going through the stages faster. In the first one I didn’t really care about time because by the end of the game I was always at the max difficulty anyways so my strategy was get as many items as possible and level up as much as possible. I think that theory might be wrong for this one. I think I need to try to get through the stages as fast as possible and just get as many items as I can on the way. 

Okay speed running might be a better way to beat the game. It’s definitely more fun as it spreads the challenge out rather than being easy at first then near impossible in the end. And it’s less painful when you fail. I made it further than ever on my last run. I made it to the actual final boss and I took his health out the first time then died during his second wave. Idk how many waves he has but I am close to getting a win. 

I consider myself a great gamer. Shooters, souls games, roguelites, RPGs, I’m great at all of them. But fuck this game is kicking my ass. Im doing something I never do. Like I can’t ever think of a time I’ve done this before. But I’m turning down the difficulty to drizzle (easy).

Beat it my first drizzle run. I think the jump from easy to normal is too large.

I don’t like how large the difficultly jumps for the final stage. I can be cruising through the first 5 but then the 6th is too big a jump. That’s another complaint about the difficulty.

Beat it again with the commander dude on easy. I’m done. It was fine. A very impressive sequel in terms of increased scope, but not quite as good as I had hoped. I played 12 hours and it was feeling repetitive for like half that time I just really wanted to get a win. There are lots of items and characters I haven’t unlocked yet so there’s lots more content. But every run is very similar because you don’t really get to decide how to create your build. It’s mostly random, and it doesn’t really change that much how you play. You end up with a shit ton of items that do passives but you don’t think about how they will play a factor. I’m still just shooting and playing the same way with a few minor exceptions like equipment and additional jumps. It ends a high B.

Final Score: B