Risk of Rain 2 Review

It is a good game for a hardcore player. One who want to engage with a community, watch guides and learn about the game. One which want to become better at it. A casual player however is unlikely to know what to do and will be locked out of vast majority of content and will be forced to play with few basic heroes and their base loadouts. It is not a good game when it comes to multiplayer aspect. It is just strictly worse solo experience and entire mode feels like tacked with little thought or effort spent on making multiplayer actually good.


Game advertises itself as a co-op game, but its multiplayer element is just an afterthought. In fact, it is a bad co-op game. Mechanics are not cooperative, but competitive. You have to compete with your friends for resources. Drops from bosses are not unique to each player and thus one player can easily take all the loot for himself. Game does not adjust itself properly for lack of containers for X people and it is common to empty the map out of loot before gold runs out. Multiplayer revolves around each player running to its own side of the map, gathering loot and when someone finds a teleporter, it gets activated. Then players briefly gather to kill a boss and then loop repeats. It is not a co-op game. It is just inferior version of solo play. With worse mob scaling. With worse loot system. Multiplayer lacks basic features like host migration or a pause. You can’t resurrect your friends if they die. Due to game scaling, that often means that once a friend dies he is then permanently behind and thus can’t carry his own weight.


Another issue is lack of information. This game is very unforgiving for a casual player. Game is full of hidden information which is not explained in game. Even in game wiki fails to give full information to make your decisions on. Items which you can reforge or print also does not show what they do. It relies on player already knowing every item in the game. Game sucks for someone who wants to play casually as no information is provided to him.

How can I unlock most characters? In tool tip it references in game events, but you are unlikely to know what you have to do without outside information. Even unlocking secondary abilities for characters can be tricky. Few abilities in this game are easy to unlock, others are a lot harder.

Then there is an issue of no tutorial. This game demands you to play this game in its own way. There is only 1 correct way of playing this and you will be forced to play it that way or otherwise you will be fighting same boss for 20 minutes when it scales out of proportion and you being just too good for this game to kick out of a match. A good tutorial is a must, but this game does not have any.


Balance of this game is also terrible in some places. For example, I wondered why I suck playing Pause. I went to look at the guides and the very first thing it said, its base abilities suck, get other ones… This is reality of some characters. Some parts of their kits are just inferior or just not worth the trouble using. Game needs to work on balancing its characters to be competitive with any character abilities rather than with some, especially when those abilities are locked behind an unlock system geared towards hardcore players.

Drones are really bad. They do not scale properly. They cost many times of a chest. They do not do damage. At the moment, outside of some bots early on like healing bots, they are just a waste of resources and they become a lot worse as a game progresses. Entire major branch of purchasable items needs to be reworked from a grounds up.

Then there are super expensive chests which spawns in a first loop. Legendary items chest, super drones. They are so expensive that you need to clear a whole map to get them while the rewards are simply just too bad when it comes to time spent in acquiring them. Game doesn’t scale or place appropriate loot in a first loop. Those items only become relevant at the second loop.

Bosses are also not balanced properly. Most bosses are fine, however the issue is that game does not care if it spawns 1 or 2 bosses. There is a massive deviation in RNG. Some runs are doomed to fail due to how long you will need to dps two of them rather than just one. The worse example are Medusas. They are absolutely horrible to deal with and some characters do not even have proper tools for it. They have tons more health and can easily screw your run. It sure does our, bad RNG at the start means that we have to restart our run if two of them are spawned on a first stage.

There is an issue with teleporters. Most of the time they are fine. However, there are situations where teleporters are spawned in a bugged or sadistic locations which seem more of “find the secret in game” kind of thing. They can completely wreck your good run. Sometimes teleporter seem to not spawn at all or is just in another “find the secret” mode. I would look for 10-15 minutes for one and never find it.

Difficulty scaling is poorly implemented. On easy, it tends to be low damage, hp sponges type of enemies. This makes you feel relaxed that you can mindlessly Pew Pew Pew enemies. However some enemies still can one shot you instantly with no telegraphing. Last boss come into mind. Difficulty scaling is inconsistent in this game.


Final boss is bad. It is cheap and can one shot you without a warning. It drags endlessly stage after same stage with a small twist. It is such a let down. Entire level is a let down. It is huge and empty. Enemies are boring and easy. It has a lot of busy work to drag the timer down. To put insult to injury, when you defeat the boss, you are given a timer in which you need to go back to your ship, play platforming mini game, charge your ship and then win a game. However, you are on a same timer. This means that you can lose a game just by going back to the ship. To make matters worse, developers had made that even if 1 player is not at the ship, all of you lose match. Last boss is just one painful experience. Quality of everything there seems to be noticeably poorer than in the rest of a game and game would actually be better without it.


The last thing about which I want to talk about are poor aesthetics of this game. It is absolutely terrible. There are countless effects, countless damage numbers. Your screen is polluted by vomit of special effects to the point nothing makes any sense anymore. Your character getting stuck with so many items is a perfect example of that. The most damning example is in Abyssal level. A red level with red colour filter fighting enemies who make red aoe effects…

Graphics is not a strong suit of this game, neither is the music. Level design or monster design. Graphics and sound is a weak point of this game, but at least primary gameplay loop is good.


This game is good, but it is good just for certain type of player. As hardcore player, this game speaks to me. A lot of content to discover and explore. Strong community around this game. A lot of depth. Game has a lot of strong points, however, it has severe problems when it comes to multiplayer and casual play. If I would not went out of my way to look for the guides and get to know this game better, this game would been absolutely horrible to me. Enemies being huge hp sponges, having no content to play with as I could not unlock new characters or loadouts. All of the hidden content would be unknown to me. This is on top of all the other problems in which game could had been better. Either way, I will be still playing and enjoying this game in the future. This review is overly critical of this game, because other reviewers are overly positive of this product and do not properly rely its weaknesses to a consumer.