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STEAM GROUP
Calicifer's reviews Calicifer
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Nightbringer 30 Apr, 2022 @ 9:19am
Risk of Rain 2: Survivors of the Void

It is a good kind of expansion which adds a lot more content and expands base game without rocking the boat. It expands and improves base game even if it leaves some flawed aspects of this game unaddressed.

The Void is spilling into our world
This expansion is like a breath of fresh air. It adds a lot of content for a small price. Most importantly, it adds variety to the game with more varied maps and void items which is an additional layer of complexity which you have to consider. It mixes things up, it adds more complexity and replayability. To me it made already great game even better.

New Items
Expansion adds a lot of new items. Greater variety adds more complexity and makes game less repetitive. What is most interesting are void items. These items are interwoven to a game in a very interesting way. There are places where two realities meet and you have to close a rift into other reality. This leaves items out of other world yours for the taking. There are also more ordinary pods which also spawn few small and fast bugs. They can attack you or to buff or turn your own summons against you.

Void items are the most interesting as they transform your traditional items to void versions of them. It changes how they function and there is always a trade off between one or another. The only issue which I have with them is that during gameplay, they get repetitive pretty quickly. Few more of them are needed. Of course, as with all new content, balance is a main concern when it comes longevity and health of new content.

New Maps
Additional maps are very much needed. In a repetitive game, variety is the key. Especially when progression is tiered. There are Tier 1 maps, Tier 2 maps, etc. Maps which only show up at certain stages during your progression. Additional maps add new life to the game.
    Siphoned Forest
  • It is a great change in scenery and mood. Previously game was dominated by wet, closed up jungles or swamps. There were few more open maps. I do enjoy how open this map is as they are my favourite types of maps. Change of scenery to winter is also welcomed. I do enjoy open, white fields.

    Sulfur Pools
  • I do enjoy this planet quite a bit. It is open with some tunnels. It has a nice sulphur colour in its soil. There are nice pools of possibly sulphur in its islands. It is easy to navigate map. It looks alien and it adds refreshing scenery to the map rotation.

    Aphelian Sanctuary
  • It is my least favourite map. It is similar to Scorched Acres in its architecture. What I dislike most about them are oversized buildings with forced paths. Without character which is not concerned about trivial terrain features like Pause or Mercenary, you will be forced slowly going around buildings with a character with questionable mobility options. Architecture is not pretty, terrain is hard to traverse. It is like Abyssal Depths or Sundered Grove. Difficult to memorise, difficult to traverse, difficult to look for teleport gates, overly punishes low mobility characters with no dashes or teleports.
New Survivors
Game adds two new survivors. One is locked while another is available right out of the gate. They feel fresh and feel unique additions to the game.
    Rail Gunner
  • Risk of Rains is rightly criticised for not being a difficult game. Most of difficulty comes initially from steep learning curve of figuring what you are supposed to do. When you do figure it out, game simply can't offer you any challenge anymore and it tries to kill you with one-shot abilities. Rail Gunner feels like survivor made for those people. Her kit so far requires most skill from all survivors to play well. She is built around being able to aim with her sniper rifle and hit weakpoints of the enemies. At first it might look simple, weakpoints are huge, rifle hit box is generous. However, soon you will be landing these shots while being under attack, jumping in the air against small and manoeuvring lizards. Her kit is all about sniping and you can do insane damage from a massive range. She feels great to play, especially with lunar item which doubles your damage.

    Void Fiend
  • This character is all about balancing states in which you happen to be. Less skilful players will go out of one state into another uncontrollably. However, knowing when to enter into void state is important as it is your primary damage state. Enter too soon and you will waste damage which you needed to spend on toughest enemies. Keep pressing your high damage buttons, you will leave your void state when you need damage the most. It is quite skilful character which is based around state and health balancing. While being survivor, you can sacrifice void build up for additional health which is a massive early game advantage. While in the void state, you are sacrificing survivability for more damage as you cannibalise your own health pool for more power. It is one of more advanced characters in this game as it is more difficult to master its interplay between various abilities.
New Game Mode
Simulacrum is a new wave based survival mode where you are fighting against increasingly powerful enemy waves. It is done really well. It has a generous safe bubble in which you have to survive. Then there are various loot crates outside that bubble. Being outside, you take increasingly more damage. This creates a dilemma, risk going for far away chests in order to get more loot or not? Then during mid wave, your shield generation will move into another place, allowing you to go hunting various chests. This mixes up monotony and makes mid section very exciting.

However, I do dislike how tedious this game mode is. You will be easily playing for an entire hour as start to this game mode is very slow. Afterwards, you will scale out of proportion as your enemies and the only way for you to die is to an instant death from an invisible enemy. In other words, it is the worst of Risk of Rain 2. Instant death abilities from God knows where. It is an interesting game mode to try it out, however, it is not quite there being actually good to play. It takes way too damn long to scale up and then you are just there, being unable to die while enemies pose you no threat.

What remains unaddressed
While I do think that this DLC was a gust of fresh air to this game, I'm disappointed that it did not addressed key issues within the game.
    Balance of drones
  • Balance of various drones is a long term issue in this game. They simply do not scale well. They are expensive, they do not do a lot of damage and their usefulness is situational. Most importantly, in a game all about the scaling, you cannot repurchase them when they die. They crash and they might be destroyed or might not appear in your map in a way which is obvious that your drone was destroyed and you can re-buy it. This game needs to do more about balancing scalability and usability of their drones.

    Terrible end boss
  • The end boss is still terrible. I'm glad that they put new boss, but it is so out of the way and hidden that most players won't even find it. They had a golden opportunity to make a better end game boss and put current one as optional. However, they chose not to do so which leaves a final environment one massively frustrating part of this game. I prefer to obliterate myself each time than to face that bullet spongy, instant killing, bullet hell nonsense of a boss.
Last edited by Nightbringer; 10 Jul, 2022 @ 8:42am