The Videogame Corner: Risk of Rain 2

Game: Risk of Rain 2
Developer: Hopoo Games
Genre: Rogue-Like
Releases: 2020 (Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One)

One evening, a cry rang out: Another multiplayer game for our illustrious Discord group is needed. So, the minds in the chat room began to think; and they arrived at one fairly obvious solution: Let’s just take something that is already there. And this is how I got in contact with “Risk of Rain 2”. The events were not nearly as dramatic or archaic as I described them, with one member simply saying that we could play “Risk of Rain 2” and no one objecting to the suggestion, but it turned out to be a good idea. I played the original “Risk of Rain”, albeit way after the hype around the game was over. That was back when you could make out to newest gaming trend by just seeing what game managed to get more views than “League of Legends” on Twitch, and therefore way before the platform turned into what feels like an “OnlyFans” clone. But I digress: The game at hand is “Risk of Rain 2”, and the article that follows is all about my mostly positive opinions about it.

I’ll be totally honest: I had my doubts about translating the original 2D “Risk of Rain” into a 3D realm. Sure, I bought the game so our Discord group had another game to play together, but it sure lingered in my library for quite some time before I touched it. Turns out, my worries were proven wrong, since “Risk of Rain 2” works really well. The premise is exactly the same as in the first title: You land on a planet, which is inhabited by monsters. In order to not become the creatures’ breakfast, you need to adept and get items, which provide you with the power you need to overcome the challenges ahead of you. Killing monsters and open smaller boxes gives you money, which can be used at chests to gain items, or to repair drones. The goal is to either reach the boss and defeat it to leave the planet’s moon, or loop your run to the start in order to deal with enough stages to open a special portal where your character can obliterate themselves to end the run.

The character roster features both newcomers as well as “Risk of Rain” veterans like Acrid.

As a 3D Rogue-like, “Risk of Rain” only really tells its story via item descriptions and by fact hunting; but in all honesty, story is only of secondary concern to me in anything with a Rogue-like approach. Instead, gameplay is king; and “Risk of Rain 2” does certainly deliver. The base game features an interesting roster of characters, all of which play to different strengths. They are as follows:

• The Commando is the starting class and more of a jack-of-all-trades character, using lots of low-damage hits to proc more effects on the opponent.
• The Huntress is basically a glass cannon character, combining high mobility and ranged damage with little tankyness.
• The Bandit is a skill-based character, that juggles his skill cooldowns via his R ability which resets all skill cooldowns when it deals a killing blow.
• The MUL-T robot has an array of options to work with, trading a powerful R ability against having more tools at his disposal.
• The Engineer does not really like direct combat and rather prepares the battlefield with turrets and mines.
• The Artificer is not unlike the Huntress, but brings more AOE damage instead of mobility.
• The Mercenary is a fast melee-based character that can become invulnerable during their attacks to survive close combat.
• REX is a machine-plant hybrid that works with skills that drain its health as well as heal it for some percentage of its health.
• The Loader is another melee character, but due to her punch dash and grappling hook has some superior mobility once you know how to use the skills.
• Acrid is a poisonous monster that excels at giving the enemies poison as an ailment, which reduces the opposing health down to one health point.
• And the Captain is a rather slow ranged character that can order attacks and beacons from his ship in the orbit.

Let me tell you right away that I am not doing justice to most of the characters with the short description I have given. Even though each character normally only has four skills, they can be used for different things and learning how to make the most of them is part of the game. Yes, the Captain can order a beacon from his ship that will heal allies standing in the area, but it also deals damage on impact. And while the Mercenary deals damage with all the skills at their disposal, you can also use most of them as additional jumps and movement tools. It is even possible to change some of the skills the characters have, since you can unlock different loadouts by doing achievements. You like playing Acrid but think that the poison is a bit pointless? Well, just unlock the option to change it to Blight, which will simply deal more damage. I for one thought that the “Tactical Dive” from the Commando leaves much to be desired; which is why I went with the “Tactical Slide” instead so that I can still fire during my dodge move.

The Captain using his rocket battery soda machine contrapment.

But the characters do not only define themselves via their skills, because there is plenty of synergy with the items the game has to offer. “Risk of Rain 2” does allow for lots of experimentation and often enough items that I picked because I felt they would be funny turned out to be absolutely bonkers. One multiplayer round started as usual, with pretty much everyone going for crit builds. Now, I had played a long round with only one other player right before that and dealt so much more damage that it was not even funny anymore, so in that following game I said that I could go for a support role and use the Captain to hack chests and run around playing scouter for items with a radar. The one player from the previous round asked me whether I wanted to feature rockets as my damage option again, and I said “Sure, why not?”. Thus began the crusade of Captain Soda: Stacking “Bundles of Fireworks” causes pretty much any interactible to fire swarms of rockets, and the more bundles you have the more rockets they fire that automatically search for targets. Combine that with “Pocket I.C.B.M.s” every time you can take a red item and you have rockets for days.

So, why did I name the entire thing Captain Soda? Well, at first my equipment slot featured a radar, but after giving that to an equipment drone, I looked for other things to equip. I went with the “Disposable Rocket Launcher” for obvious reasons, but by pure chance I stood before one of my mates “Remote Caffeinator“, a soda machine that you can interact with up to twelve times which then dispenses healing items. Guess what, interacting with that thing fires rockets too, so at the end of the game I simply ordered myself a vending machine, stood in front of it, and spammed E until that things was empty, which resulted in me spawning another soda machine. During the startup of the last phase of the end boss fight, there were still so many rockets in the air that they swooped down before the life bar could even appear, completely skipping that part of the fight. And during the stages I had to take pauses from spamming because the sheer amount of rockets in the air searching for targets cause the game’s performance to tank quite badly. “Risk of Rain 2” really manages that feeling of power that you can reach in Rogue-likes, because you will eventually get to the point where you basically sneeze monsters out of existence.

In fact, the item design is absolutely superb. There are items which I would claim are my favorites, and there are items that I do not go for that often; but I cannot say that they do not work. At some point in time, when playing with the “Artifact of Command” which allows you to pick items yourself instead of getting random ones, there will be picks for the nice-to-have stuff. The key is to balance survivability with damage, since too much of one and not enough of the other will eventually kill you. But there is plenty to work with: Whether you like shocking entire enemy groups with the “Ukulele“, have more equipment uses via the “Fuel Cell“, or simply want to go fast stacking “Energy Drinks“, they all help the character and sure as hell will spiral completely out of proportion once you are far enough in the game and stacked a few of them. I played Acrid before and went with stacking “Fuel Cells” to have a massive damage burst with the “Sawmerang“, and felling foes with the Commando and a butt-load of “Shurikens” is not that hard either. I could name countless builds, but the essence of what I am trying to say is that you can go wild in “Risk of Rain 2” since the item design invites players to do crazy stuff.

And crazy stuff is going to be necessary over time, I can guarantee you that. The enemies start rather weak, with Lemurians, Beetles, and Wisps being easy to handle even without any items. However, over time enemies will spawn as elites, having more health and elemental attacks, which is determined by the in-game difficulty tracker that increases over time. And depending how far into the run you are there will also be bosses spawning randomly in the level as well as harder enemies like Clay Guardians or the Scavenger, the latter having a backpack full of goodies but is good at both taking and dealing major punishment. This is also where the difficulty choice becomes relevant, since there are three distinct difficulties to choose from, just like in the original “Risk of Rain”. “Drizzle” is the easiest difficulty and perfect for when you want to do achievements or just intent to go for a crazy build without bone-crushing enemies. “Rainstorm” is the normal difficulty without the lower in-game difficulty progression and added health regeneration and the “way the game is meant to be played”. And then there is “Monsoon”, for those who have masochistic tendencies where every second wasted could mean that you stand with one foot in the grave already. Chances are that “Risk of Rain 2” has a difficulty level that is right for you.

The Commando and MUL-T taking a break from all the killing by healing themselves with mushrooms.

After so much praise, it is time that I get a little bit more critical. So, there are two major things that actually annoyed me in “Risk of Rain 2”, but both of which become less significant the longer you play the game. First off, the search for the teleporter is seriously annoying in some of the levels. Unless you know all the sidepaths that the teleporter can spawn in, you might as well run around for half an hour looking for phantoms and seeing the difficulty level slowly increasing while you make no progress. Now, when you get more familiar with “Risk of Rain 2”, this happens to be less of an issue since you get to know the map layouts and also manage to see the particle effect of a teleporter more easily from afar. And if you play in a party, you have plenty of other players also looking for a way forward, which helps immensely since you can just move in different directions and cover a greater area that way.

The other thing that leaves me puzzled is the fact that there are no tooltips in-game for the items you can obtain. Items are of paramount importance in “Risk of Rain 2”, and having a good build makes all the difference between utter failure and total domination. And using the “Artifact of Command”, you can build the dream build since instead of dropping a random item you can just choose whatever you like from all unlocked items or that rarity level. So why do I have to know all of the items by heart? It could not have cost the world to have a box pop up whenever I look at an item or when I am near it, and over time this would have given me the chance to learn the effects naturally. However, seeing how “Risk of Rain 2” solves it, I have to pause mid-game, open a tap to the wiki or some place else that lists the item effects, and then decide from there what to work with. This often leads to our four-player party all picking the “Lens-Maker’s Glasses“, since 10% crit chance is not only easy to keep in mind but also means guaranteed double damage when you stacked ten of them, instead of going for more interesting and experimental approaches.

You might be here for two minutes, or half an hour. Praise RNG.

Oh, there is one more small thing that I found to be somewhat annoying: The Artifact stage. “Risk of Rain 2” features sixteen artifacts, run-altering options basically, that you can unlock in the Sky Meadow map if you know the correct codes. The input of a valid code in the sciency-looking part below the map will open a new portal that brings you to Bulwark’s Ambry, where the artifact in question is protected by an orb that can only be destroyed by using four artifact keys on it. Now, the first one is free, but the three keys after that need to be collected from the monsters that spawns on a semi-regular basis. Now, here is my question: Why not simply introduce waves of enemies and give me a key after successfully surviving that, rather than potentially having to wait for fifteen minutes for a key to spawn? I like having more options and I have completed all of the artifact stages to have the full range, but in some runs I had keys for days and finished the stage in what felt like a few minutes, while in others I waited for anything to happen for half an hour, looking up on Google whether I had done something wrong that needed to fix.

But apart from those minor annoyances, “Risk of Rain 2” is a cool game. Granted, some of what the achievements want me to do is ridiculous, and I can think of many things before I attempt a Monsoon run ever again, but I like that you can go hog-wild with builds. “Risk of Rain 2” is a game that eats up time rather naturally, with you wondering where that hour went that you just played, which is definitely a good thing and speaks for the entertainment value of the title. And on top of that, it is a brilliant multiplayer game with our Discord group only having touched the surface of how support builds could be achieved. The game has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam, and while Steam users normally have a bias to call any game good unless it has some severe flaws, I would tend to agree with the statement and say that 24.99€ for the game is a price worth paying for the entertainment you get out of it.