A Fresh Approach to Character Progression
Risk of Rain’s claim to fame is its inventive character progression system. Queue up with three other players with online matchmaking, or choose to go it alone. Pick one of 6 unlockable characters currently available, and battle your way through an endless stage-based shooter populated with a handful of map environments and a collection of unique enemies and bosses. The core loop of the game is fairly simple: arrive at a stage, kill enemies to earn money, purchase items, find the teleporter, fight the boss, and go through the teleporter on to the next stage. Rinse and repeat. The interesting part comes from the way item’s affect the player. You can collect an infinite number of items, each with a passive effect ranging from allowing you to hold multiple charges of an ability, to making you jump higher, to spawning homing daggers upon killing an enemy. Stack these items to transform your character from a slow-moving, uninteresting weakling, to a monster-purging badass moving at the speed of light and clearing scores of enemies at the click of a button. The difficulty ramps up constantly as you play your match, but this is balanced out by your character’s increasingly absurd strength.
Addicting Power
The longer your match progresses, the more fun you’ll start to have. Enemies and projectiles are flying everywhere as you dodge and reposition constantly, firing off your skills in rapid succession to try to fight off the intense waves of enemies closing in on you. Less experienced players may have no idea what’s going on, but you quickly learn to decipher the mess and focus on what’s important. As your items pile up, your destructive power becomes more and more fun to play with. My favorite character of them all is still the Huntress, and when I finally get the items I need, the entire map can be cleared with just a hand full of ability uses. Each enemy that dies will explode, release knives, and light others on fire, causing a huge chain reaction of destruction. Damage numbers flood my screen, and not meaningless bloated numbers in the thousands that you’ll see in a JRPG; these numbers can be read and will make you actually feel like you’re annihilating your enemies.
Artstyle and Sound
The music is unique and interesting but can feel a bit in your face rather than in the background. This might be good for some, as the repetitive and mindless nature of the gameplay won’t be interfered with by prominent music.
The art style is simplistic, as it has to be for you to have any hope of understanding what is happening on your screen. However, rather than opting for the simple flat coloring that is prominent in low poly games, Risk of Rain 2 chooses a blurry texture style that confuses the classic “removing detail in favor of simplistic style” with its own “blurring details for a myopic aesthetic."
Is this “Co-op”? I’m not so sure…
Risk of Rain 2’s primary game mode is 4-player multiplayer co-op. Sadly the “co-op” side of this experience leaves a lot to be desired. Players have little to no incentive to work together, and it tends to feel more like a single player experience with other players who just happened to be there. Worst of all, there are actually incentives NOT to work together. Every match is a competition against your own team to buy up the items that are scattered around the map. If you’re too slow, your teammates will hoard all of the items, leaving you underpowered, and even worse, bored. You have no choice but to race around the map and grab items before you’re left behind. To make matters worse, after you buy an item, it drops to the floor with nothing preventing your teammate from taking it from you. Wait until there is no one around before you open a chest because stealing items is painfully easy. Each time a boss is killed an uncommon item is dropped for each player, but more often than not one player takes more than their fair share, leaving at least one player (and often all of the other players) without a reward. Co-op PvE games are my favorite type of game of ALL TIME, but even I have resorted to playing single player to ensure that my experience is not ruined by item hoarding “allies.”
Why should I keep playing?
A potential issue I see affecting Risk of Rain 2’s longevity is a lack of progression outside of each match. The characters and items are all unlockable, but I unlocked all of the characters within a few days, and item unlocks happen naturally rather than being a goal to strive for. Many multiplayer games that have you repeating the same game player over and over have distinct progression systems to keep their players playing the game. Call of Duty has constant unlocks of guns and skills, which then reset once you decide to prestige. The inclusion of prestige (which can be seen in other games as well, i.e. Killing Floor 2), demonstrates the importance of progression in giving players a constant goal to strive to. Playing more matches can feel pointless, even when the gameplay is as fun as Risk of Rain 2’s. On my first few days owning the game, I played for hours on end trying to unlock all of the characters. Once I had them, my motivation to play dwindled. As a goal-driven person myself, this is fairly important to me, but perhaps other players won’t care nearly as much as I will. Many players do not share my love for grinding, so perhaps a strong player base will remain in spite of this. I can only hope, as I sincerely hope this game lives on for a long time.
I can’t find the damn teleporter
There are other small issues the may slow down your fast-paced action experience. When playing solo especially, finding the teleporter can be a serious struggle, sometimes taking over 15 minutes after I’ve already cleared out the whole map. I’ve gotten better at this and can do it faster now, but no matter how hard I try it still takes too damn long. After playing matches many times in a row, the beginning of a match starts to feel a bit slow. I tend to want to hurry up and collect the items I need to start having more fun, which can take upwards of 20 minutes. I’d love to start with a few items, either random or, even better, let me choose them. Having a small build out before you start would be nice, and maybe you could start a progression system around this! This could certainly ruin the game flow if done wrong, but if done correctly it would greatly speed up how long it takes for me to seriously start enjoying the match.
Risk of Rain 2 has huge promise. It’s unique mechanics make for some incredibly satisfying gameplay that heavily outweighs its flaws. The game is still in early access at the time of writing this, and I expect many improvements to be made on the game.
