Risk of Rain 2 Is One Of The Most Chaotic Roguelikes Ever, And It’s Especially Good With Friends
It’s really coming down out there.
The roguelike genre is all about controlled chaos. Each time you start a run, you have no idea what’s about to be thrown at you. The key is to get the randomly generated items and perks you acquire to fuse in a way that lets you beat the challenges ahead. At least, that’s the case for most of them. But in one foundational roguelike now on PlayStation Plus, it’s all about rolling with the regular, uncontrolled kind of chaos and hanging on for dear life.
Risk of Rain is a fantastic 2D roguelike released in 2013. Its flexible upgrade system and a huge variety of characters and upgrades made it a hit, but rather than just trying to repeat its success in a sequel, developer Hopoo Games took a huge, unexpected swing, bringing it into 3D.
There’s a lot going on in Risk of Rain 2, and it will take you some time to get your head around it.
It’s a bold choice, to be sure, and one that Risk of Rain 2 fundamentally shakes up without losing the soul of what made the original great. The first game is about as hectic as roguelikes get, with constantly spawning enemies that get more difficult the longer you fight them, and the sequel’s shift to 3D means your foes can now come at you from all sides as you navigate a significantly more complex environment.
In every stage of Risk of Rain 2, your goal is to reach a teleporter hidden somewhere on your level, which takes you to the next. Activating the teleporter means summoning a difficult boss, so as you make your way there, you need to scour the world for upgrades that radically change your abilities while fighting lesser baddies along the way.
Risk of Rain 2 is an extremely tough game and you should expect a lot of failures on the way to victory. But what makes it such a wonderfully chaotic experience isn’t just the enemies you face, it’s the ways you have to boost your own build throughout your run. Like the original game, Risk of Rain 2 has a tremendous number of upgrades to collect, and to put it mildly, they’re extremely wild. Upgrades come in the form of items you find scattered around levels, and before you pick them up, you won’t necessarily know what they do. Sure, if you pick up a missile launcher, it unsurprisingly starts launching missiles, but a teddy bear that increases your defense or a ukulele that adds chain lightning to your attacks are a bit less obvious. At least until you learn what each upgrade does, that means picking up any item can be a gamble and you need to be prepared to work anything into your strategy.
To even stand a chance in Risk of Rain 2, you need to be willing to try some wild combinations of abilities.
And I mean anything. On top of pickups that let you evade attacks, gain a double jump, or do more damage — standard stuff — Risk of Rain 2 is full of chances to completely remake your character in a single moment. The most dramatic of these come from usable items, rather than passive bonuses, which grant a huge variety of new abilities. You might find a stone that summons a storm of meteors on friends and foes alike in one run, and a jar that spawns ghostly allies from your fallen enemies the next.
That’s all on top of more than a dozen characters you can choose from in Risk of Rain 2, each with their own innate abilities ranging from spewing poison to zipping around levels on a grappling hook. At the start of the game, your selection of characters and items is limited, but given the sheer volume of unlockables, you’ll get access to new ones at a rapid pace at the beginning. Unlocking new characters and items might just mean progressing far enough into the game, but others require you to hit specific achievements, sometimes tied to rarely spawning stages and events within the game.
That all makes Risk of Rain 2 a tremendously variable game. The promise of most roguelikes is that no two runs will ever be entirely the same, and Risk of Rain 2 takes that philosophy to the extreme. That level of chaos might not be for everyone, but especially in its co-op mode, it makes for some incredibly surprising runs that only get stranger as you unlock more of the game’s secrets.
