Recent reviews by TheOnlyBongo

So let me just preface this: The game itself is very solid and very fun to play. I enjoy the Roguelike elements when playing with friends. Collecting loot, getting better at the came. amassing a large collection of items and just leveling up in general. It can get really fun later in the game when you figure out what combination of items on the right character works. One of my favorites was to be the Huntress character and get a ton of "Backup Magazine" loot items alongside "Soldier Syringe". I could fire off my Laser Glaive so many times and just bounce hits between enemies so often it was extremely fun.

But, all the fun aside, the worst part is honestly the ending boss battle. There are a ton of reviews that already cover how you can get soft locked out of the level if you have a character with low mobility, but I am not going to be talking about that.

Instead I want to talk about the boss though, because he annoyed the heck out of me. There are different stages to the boss fight, which is normal I am fine with that. The boss has cheap moments but you can deal with those with enough time. The worst part is the final form of the boss. Spoilers ahead.

Risk of Rain 2 is a Roguelike and you are expected to take as many items as you can to help better you later in combat. Everyone will loot everything, it's just expected. What happens in the last form of the boss is that he will take EVERY ITEM IN YOUR INVENTORY and apply those effects to himself, and you have to fight the boss, who has all the buffs of your items, without the buffs of your items.

The boss fight becomes IMPOSSIBLE if you were stocking up on things like shields, regenerative items, etc. You cannot deal enough damage to him if you stack yourself to be extremely well equipped against the boss because all those stacks you did on yourself gets applied to the boss. It seriously becomes an unfun fight that can go into like 80+ minutes depending on how buffed you are PLUS how buffed your friends are. Everyone gets set back to square one whilst the boss reaches his final cheap ultimate form.

HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: When playing Risk of Rain 2, on the stage right before you get to the boss, you have to have to HAVE TO find an item scrapper. You NEED to scrap any and all items that would absolutely benefit him. Health regenerative items, shield items, things like that. Anything that gives the boss a buff you NEED to scrap before the final fight in order to have a chance to survive. First time me and my friends fought the boss all of our healing and shield items were taken and the boss was untouchable up until he just straight up annihilated us. Second time we were mindful of the items we carried to the boss and we won the fight, although with only 1 survivor still.

That's what I hate about Risk of Rain 2. I love the gameplay and the loot, but what loot shooter punishes you for LOOTING in a game DESIGNED around LOOTING EVERYTHING IN SIGHT? How dumb is it that before going into a boss arena, you have to trash ALL of your health regenerative and shield items in order to not make the boss impossible to beat?

Maybe some people had it easier, but with a full party of people all laden down with some of the best items in the game? The boss sucks. I hate that the game punishes you for playing the way many roguelikes are intended to be played. Combine that with soft locking at the end due to terrible level design and yeah...you just feel like you WASTED a lot of time when games range from the 60-90+ minute range and it all culminates into the cheapest item stealing boss ever.

People are mentioning crashes, but by the time I got around to playing this game (About a month after the PC release) I think it is much more stable. I've had crashes here and there, usually at the end of a very long play session, but the comments are making it out to be it will crash every 5 minutes or so. And in my case that just didn't happen.

As for the game, what more can I say? I already put in almost 50 hours into this and I am still having a blast. Some people say that the game can get too long, and I haven't encountered that yet but right now I can just sink a ton of hours in RDR2 and get lost in everything. To the point where I don't even like utilizing fast travel, I just enjoy running through the scenery even if I've seen it dozens of times before.

Even though the community is dead (It isn't really? At its peak during the day there are around 3 servers full of only players and then a handful of servers with 1-10 people in them with bots) this game had the foresight to have bots easily available to play with either in a single player solo mode or bots in multiplayer. So even if there are only 4 people in a server it is still playable. As well as the fact that if internet is not strong then single player with bots as practice is a great way to go.

Many other multiplayer games could learn a thing or two to just include bots from the getgo. Even if they are somewhat braindead they can help keep servers afloat that only have 1-6 people playing. All other reviews will cover the other great aspects of the game from its sound design to how easy it is to pick up and play and learn.

This is coming from someone who has not played any sort of Call of Duty game before, and has not bowed down to the droves of people that hate Call of Duty just for being Call of Duty. So this is an honest opinion from someone who has no prior history, good or bad, with the game.

With that said, what can I say about this game? It's not absolutely terrible, but I can't recommend it to anyone that is not a Call of Duty fan already. I can call the game mediocre at best without pause to think. Let me just list out some of the pros and cons I have with this game:


PROS:


- WWII Setting. Still one of my favorite war-time settings of history in video games despite it having saturated the market many years ago and still left its mark in the gaming industry (In how modern FPS games have nearly abandoned the era. Battlefield has WWI and CoD is returning to WWII but overall the 1940s era of gaming is still down out of the count.

- Guns: I am always a fan of the armament that WWII supplied to both the Axis and the Allies so no complaints there.

- Pacific Theater. So many WWII shooters focus mainly on the European Theater and rarely the African Theater alongside the Pacific Theater, so to see half of the campaign take place in the Pacific is quite a treat.

- Zombie mode. It is NOT my type of thing but I know a LOT of people enjoy this game mode, and it spun off into its own big thing from here so if you enjoy zombie wave survival minigames then you would enjoy this mode. But if you are here for the solo campaign and multiplayer, well...


Unfortunately for me the bad outweighs the good, because after finishing the game I have quite a lot to say about it.


CONS:


- Cost & Length. This game has a base price of $20 and rarely (If ever) goes on sale for more the 50% off. They are asking $20 for a game whose solo campaign can be completed in 6 hours on Normal to Hard difficulty, a multiplayer that is practically dead for all I care, and a zombie wave survival minigame. I know that people can find enjoyment in the zombie mode and that servers do crop up occasionally, but overall for what it's worth to me this is not a $10 game.

At most I'd say it's a $5 due to the length of the solo campaign and how much time the zombie mode captivated me, resulting in just about 6.1 hours in total with no wishes to return to the game. That's about $1.6 spent per hour for people just interested in a solo campaign mode without zombies. This game is not worth about $2 per hour to play for me. Why?

- Campaign. Let me put it short and sweet: Take my sentence of "short and sweet" and then remove the "sweet" part. What gets left? "short and...?" Exactly. All the missions are extremely small and very short, and after spending less than 30 minutes on some levels they are already done! I would have liked it if they made less missions overall but lengthened the levels tremendously, because hopping between missions and being totally disjointed from each other vs. sticking to one mission and feeling the fatigue of war encapsulate is an entirely different experience altogether. The campaigns themselves weren't even that well thought out even, and felt really really monotonous after getting through the first four levels, which made the later levels an absolute slough to trudge through because of...

- Cheap deaths/Cheap difficulty. This all comes down to four things: Enemy respawns, small health, grenades, and color. Respawning enemies are always ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, especially when you have to take an objective. I want to play it safe and straight, so I would OF COURSE clear out an area before moving up. Oh...but what's this? Enemies will continuously spawn out of inaccessible doorways and won't stop until you move forward? Then let me KILL THEN AND MOVE FORWARD!

And the health! Wow if your health small. Doesn't matter if you can regenerate health if it only takes like 5 bullets to kill you because most people don't have the reflexes of a fox and pretty much everything is done trial by error. There are a lot of single player campaigns where you have to learn from a failure because you didn't know something ahead of time, but there is a difference between learning ahead of time and dying in the next minute because you just don't have enough health.

AND THE GRENADES. WOW. They tell you to throw the grenade when you see the grenade symbol, but you end up throwing your own grenade instead and dying. Let me tell you grenades are the cheaptest weapon in the game and have been the cause of countless deaths. There is a fine line drawn between being realistic (Which the grenades aren't even but whatever) and being a fun game; games should always strive to be fun firstoff and foremost. And dying every minute is not fun.

And lastly this isn't entirely Call of Duty's fault as every game was doing it, but making everything have this dull grey monotone color for everything, from the trees to the ruble, from the enemies to the gunfire, not only makes the game boring to look at, but it also makes everything very difficult to see. So what if you can't see enemies, right? That's how it's supposed to work, with their camo making them blend in with the surroundings? So what if gun barrel fire looks the same as a building, the sky, or even a BUSH? If that's the excuse to use then that is a terrible excuse. THEY ARE 5 FEET IN FRONT OF YOU AND YOU CAN'T SEE THEM. THAT IS TERRIBLE. Not being able to see anything leads to a lot of death in the game. Cheap death.


Is it a bad game? No. Is it a good game? No. It's simply mediocre. The first two hours of playing were fun and I wanted to see more. But as the game progressed further, I just became angrier and angrier. And when it finally ended, I didn't feel satisfied at all. I felt robbed. $10 for a short, difficult, and monotonous game that didn't grab my attention past the initial single player levels. Multiplayer is dead and unless you like playing zombies on your own then that portion is dead too. Paying $10 for a game with only 1/3rd of its content left to use. That disappoints me so because I really wanted to give this game an earnest chance and look beyond the franchise's preconcieved hatred of just being another Call of Duty game.


Take my advice, use your $10 to $20 elsewhere. If you want recommendations, here's what I suggest you get for the same price:


- Sniper Elite (Any of them). Rock solid single player campaign with very satisfying deaths and a decent length to it. Not forgetting to mention the later games have some excellent art direction.

- Medal of Honor: Airborne. Already $10 as a base price (TAKE THE HINT CALL OF DUTY. A 10+ YEAR GAME SHOULDN'T COST $20. ESPECIALLY WHEN 1/3RD OF THE GAME IS USABLE) it earns that full $10 price sticker. It only has 5 or 6 levels but they are REALLY thick and pack a punch and by the end of it you feel like you really did accomplish something. Compared to CoD: WaW's endings where I was just tanking everything and sloughing through to complete the game.

- Wolfenstein: The New Order. This game is fun to play. It's much more fast paced than CoD: WaW with a nice campaign and guns that pack a punch. Great for its price I'd say.

- Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm. This game has a bit of a steeper learning curve as it plays more like a simulator than a traditional FPS game (Traditional by Call of Duty standards) but once you get over the hump of trying to learn the basics of the game, you will find a VERY much alive dedicated multiplayer and an absolutely rock solid single player campaign that portrays the struggle of the Russian front better than WaW did.

- Company of Heroes. RTS WWII. Need I say more?

- Day of Defeat: Source. This game's graphics haven't aged, but it is still a very fun game that not only has a lively multiplayer scene but can pretty much run on today's potato computers. So if you got a WWII multiplayer fix with a terrible laptop, Day of Defeat can service you just fine.