I was a big fan of the original Risk of Rain, a roguelike platformer where you needed to find teleporters to progress through multiple levels while finding powerful artefacts with impressive effects while the screen filled with more and more dangerous enemies (with a very real timer showing you in real time how the difficulty was going to progress in the near future). Risk of Rain 2 capitalizes on these strengths and turns the whole thing into a third person shooter. It should work, but sadly for me I had to fight against the core “need to find teleporters to progress” concept and just couldn’t do it.
This kind of game works really well as a third person shooter; you have your default attack, a special move and another move on a longer cooldown. The traversal in three timensions means that you have even more places to search and more directions to fight enemies from. The jetpack feels good and the glut of upgrades you pick along the way are still as fun as even. The enemies themselves are well designed - even if the end of wave bosses can sometimes be pretty difficult - but it’s the kind of game where you unlock new things as you progress and you’re expected to try again.
My biggest issue with RoR2 is that I just couldn’t find the way to progress 90% of the time. In all the hours I’ve attempted to play the game, I mainly couldn’t find the teleporter to move on. My sense of orientation might be bad, there might be some trick to it that I couldn’t figure out, but I spent a lot of time just wandering around, going in circles, trying to find where I had to go next. These maps aren’t that big, so after a short while maybe just pinging the destination could’ve been a nice touch? As-is I just felt stuck and frustrated.
And that’s why I stopped with this one, I felt that the fun of Risk of Rain was in the progressin through tougher biomes with more upgrades and different enemies and that you’d loop and redo the stages all over again, but without being able to find how to advance in the stages most of the time, that was just an exercise in frustration. Unfortunate!
