Risk of Rain 2: Endless Chaos

If I had to describe a game that was fun, to an extent where you lost track of what's going on around you, is fresh every time you play it, and have your frames dropping when the chaos intensifies, Risk of Rain 2 would fit in quite easily. I bought this game last year when it was still in early access, but did not actively play it until the past few months. The game is developed by Hopoo Games and has graduated from the early access to 1.0 version in August 2020.

To give a quick intro about the game, Risk of Rain 2 is a third-person PvE, roguelike shooter, with 5 stages (plus a boss stage), along with an ever-increasing difficulty. You are put up against enemies that you need to defeat, so you can charge up the teleporter that lets you access the next stage. As you kill the enemies around, you receive coins, that you can use to get yourself items around the map, that'll help you increase your damage. The coins you earn can also be used to acquire turrets, some static and some that follow you across stages. Your ultimate aim is to defeat the final boss, called Mithrix, who you'll meet after the 5th stage (or don't defeat the boss and find secret paths). The game can be completed in a squad of 4 or as a single player.

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UNIQUE CHARACTERS

There are a total of "10 survivors" available in the game, each unique in their own way. Out of the pool, most of them are ranged, and only a few have melee skills. Each survivor has four abilities, 2 of which are the primary and secondary attacks. The other two skills, that is, utility and special skills are quite different for each survivor, since not all focus on dealing damage.

Survivors

When it comes to the comparison between ranged and melee, the game isn't exactly merciful towards the melee survivors since the burn damage can be quite brutal, and this may be hard to avoid if the survivor is only focussing on melee damage.

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EVERGREEN OBJECTIVES

The game has the tendency to keep players hooked for hours, where they try different approaches each time. But the concept of "Evergreen objectives" makes the game's objectives unique. Besides having the main objective of finishing a run and defeating the boss, players also have many survivors to unlock, which are unlocked by completing certain challenges.

For example, one of the survivors named Rex can be unlocked in Abyssal Depths, which is one of the maps that can occur for stage 4. But in order to do this, players upon spawning will need to grab a fuel array from the pod they spawn in and escort it to the stage. The fuel array takes up the equipment slot, and once the player reaches the location, they need to make their way high up and find Rex's inactive body. Upon interacting with it with the fuel array, they can then unlock the survivor, which will be available to play when the players start a new run.

The objectives don't end there. Each survivor has a loadout of skills, and some of them are not available from the beginning. These are again, challenges, that players will need to complete, and some are frankly, quite hard.

Loadout Screen - Locked skills

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BUILDING AGENCY

The main focus of the game is on building the perfect loadout. A player's entire game is dependent on the types of items they pick up that are suitable for their survivor's skill set. All the items that players find from the chests, after paying the required coins, are random. Fortunately, Risk of Rain 2 has added scrappers as well that lets you discard the items that players don't need, but lets them make use of the scrap. This balances out the randomness that comes along with roguelike games since this feature gives some level of control to the players.

There are also printers, a mechanic, that lets players gain control over their build. Printers have an item displayed which remains constant. Upon interaction, printers will take a random item of the same rarity from the player's inventory and dispense out the item on display on the printer.

All the items available in game

But choosing the right items will not happen on your first run, especially when you cannot predict what items you'll get. Only by doing several runs will players actually learn the pros and cons of an item and eventually learn how to discard them

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DIFFICULTY: High-risk High reward

The game has an interesting difficulty system. Before beginning a run, players can choose what difficulty mode to play on. The three modes available are Drizzle, Rainstorm, and Monsoon.

The three modes

They have different status effects on the player's health and the rate at which difficulty scales over time, as well as the rate at which players heal. When in-game, the difficulty scales infinitely over time which means the enemies will keep leveling up parallelly, regardless of the mode they choose.

Having variation in the difficulty mode is actually a good design decision since it lets players experience the game in all aspects while having a consistent difficulty increase. By having three difficulty modes, players can learn and play at their own pace, especially the new ones (on Drizzle) as they can explore around slowly, discovering new enemies as they go ahead, but with less punishing effects.

On the other hand, people who want to get straight to the action, with slower health regeneration, they can choose Monsoon, and start their chaos comparatively early.

But as the in-game difficulty goes up, enemies also level-up, the feedback of which is provided via a level-up sound effect. The difficulty also jumps up when players progress to the next stage. The spawn rate also changes as the difficulty goes up, making enemies spawn in large numbers and at a higher frequency. At times, this may lead to spawning mini-bosses, which aren't easy to beat. Along with all this. the cost of chests that drops items also gets affected as players progress to the next stage.

The high-risk high-reward comes into play when players decide to stay longer at the location, with the objective to acquire all chests present on the location. The longer they stay, the more enemies spawn, hence letting them acquire more money to open chests. This is a good strategy to make players stronger from the beginning but comes at a risk of increasing the difficulty by a lot for the next stage.

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MAPS - THE PROGRESSION

Risk of Rain 2 comes along with a wide range of maps, all having their unique learning curves. The game is divided into 5 stages, and each stage has a variety of maps available so that the game does not feel repetitive.

Map collection

Beginning with the first stage, the maps available in this stage are linear and very limited in size. These are grounds for practice for the players to learn simple things like killing enemies, moving around using jump pads, and opening chests to gain items. It's a good start to the game's journey because once players are used to this confined space, they can eventually become comfortable with open areas.

The second stage starts bringing in tiny bits of platforming. These aren't a must for the gameplay at this stage, and only special activities may require you to do the platforming, like accessing altars. One important thing to note is that at this stage, players will be introduced to secret areas, mostly by accident.

The third stage brings in huge amounts of platforming, and it is absolutely necessary that at this stage, players have built their loadout in a way that promotes mobility. Because from this stage, platforming becomes an absolute need for survival, instead of just limiting to acquiring items.

By the fourth stage, the chaos meter has already gone up, and players will need to survive by dodging and climbing. Something unique to this stage is that there is a way to spawn a guaranteed red item, no matter what the map is. One of the ways to do this on Siren's Call is to spawn a mini-boss, which drops a legendary item. On Abyssal Depths, players will need to farm a lot of enemies and have enough money to open a legendary box.

The last stage before the main boss fight is always one map, named Sky Meadow. This map is the ultimate definition of chaos since the action meter along with traversing around the map becomes hectic. Besides this, the teleporter event on this map has two ways of interaction, one leading to the final battle, and the other causing you to loop back to the first stage.

This map also has a generator available which lets you access a trial where you gain artifacts. These are basically in-game modifiers, which players can unlock by completing several runs.

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SETBACKS

The game has all the action designed elegantly, but there are a few sections of the game that felt underwhelming.

The final boss fight felt quite underwhelming. As a player, they have to make their way into a superlinear map, eliminate the few enemies on the way, and landing in the boss arena. The boss arena felt quite limiting and constricting after having explored and played at very open levels/maps.

Mithrix - The final boss (linear ending)

The boss does an insane amount of melee damage and has patterns of attacks that are more suitable for dodging as a ranged character. But the variety of attacks available for the Boss is a little limited as well since if a player finds a way to reach higher, they can completely dodge Mithrix's attacks, eventually making the fight boring and predictable.

Secondly, if players are playing in a squad, and one of them die early, it becomes incredibly difficult for that player to finally gain their strength back and be equally powerful as others in the squad. Unless you're playing with cooperative players, this is more or less the end of your run.

Third, some enemies deal a huge amount of damage, and these tiny enemies are found towards the later stages, called Mushrooms. They throw projectiles that land on the ground, dealing damage over time. Players take damage if they are standing on that landed projectile splat. When the difficulty is up, there is a chance that many mushrooms may spawn, and if players don't eliminate them quickly, these minions can have the player dead in a few seconds.

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SUGGESTIONS

Risk of Rain 2 is a well-balanced game, with some really beautiful art. From a design point of view, I believe that a few aspects are still unexplored and could definitely be tested to see if they would work out.

To follow up on the point mentioned under Setback for the final boss, Mithrix. The addition of more attack patterns can keep the player on the move. If players find a way to reach higher ground and dodge attacks for the entire fight, the boss should have a way to destroy those pillars and bring down the player. This is just one of the attack suggestions, and surely there are more patterns that can be added. Having a few weak-points on bosses would also be good, helping bring in different strategies.

Environmental damage is also not quite used to its full potential. Besides fall damage, and tiny pots/batteries blowing up, this feature can be extensively explored. The damage they deal is not a lot, and once destroyed they definitely cannot spawn back.

Hence, adding more damage, and different types of traps that respawn over time could help add more variety by mixing survivor abilities, giving rise to emergent gameplay.

Following up on the previous suggestion, having more synchronization between each survivor's skill would also be great. It currently exists, for example, if Rex were to grab enemies with its root, Captain uses this opportunity to bring down a barrage of orbital strikes and deal concentrated damage.

In regards to items, having the teleporter drop red items towards the later stages would also be a great addition. This was suggested by one of my friends during our playtime, since we were quite disappointed when at stage 5, after defeating the boss, we received green items

Please note, the views mentioned in this blog are purely personal and are based on my play sessions. These are meant to express my design thoughts that I come across during my playtime.