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As someone who doesn't really believe they like roguelikes, this game very much surprised me. My friends have been fans since even the first game, and when they wanted to put me on it around the release of Survivors of the Void (first DLC expansion) I was certainly skeptical. My friend streamed a bit of gameplay to me n it looked fine I suppose. I picked it up expecting to play it a couple of times with the gang but not touch it much myself.
Well, you can all see the hour count on this review (and likely the hours since.)
This game is truly great! It has tangible progression despite being a roguelike and (generally) every run starting you from zero like normal. The game has a relatively simple art style, but not in a way that seems amateur or even minimalistic, it serves the gameplay in a way to let the player easily process everything that's happening on screen even when things get crazy. Nearly every survivor feels great to use, and while I felt the unlocking of other characters n items may have hampered my enjoyment of the game at the time, I feel it was perfectly designed in retrospect. Things like Lunar items I would have just got myself killed by picking up at that time because I wouldn't have known better.
Risk of Rain 2 has a constantly ramping difficulty system - meaning the difficulty is always increasing passively regardless of what items you do or don't have. This keeps gameplay interesting constantly, albeit with quite a slow start on medium or easy difficulties once you become even a little familiar with the loop. That might sound intimidating but I promise it has kept the game fun and interesting no matter how many stages I learn like the back of my hand. There are a lot of little secrets that you will unlock as you become more comfortable exploring every inch of each level, continuing to keep the game interesting on subsequent playthroughs. The loot drops also almost always feel fair, even when it's left completely to RNG. There is only a handful of mildly useless items in the game in a pool of over 200, and even they have their niche use cases. Additionally, random placement of stations that are able to fabricate a specific item at the cost of an item or item scrap of the same tier allow you to somewhat tailor your build to your tastes, without ever being fully in control. It is to be commended how varied the ten base survivors are. None of them move or fight in the same way. Because of unlockable alternate skills, you can give any of your survivors a slightly different way of handling things to an entirely different playstyle depending on the skill.
In Risk of Rain 2, you progress through the game in "Stages." These are a collection of environments per level you have progressed to. For example, there are (including variants but not including DLC) five potential environments you can load into on stage 1. From there you must find the elusive Teleporter, which spawns randomly on the stage every time, enhancing replayability. Once you have charged the Teleporter and fought a boss, you can progress to the next stage. Begin again at stage 2. The base game is nearly devoid of bad enemy design. Most enemies have multiple methods of attack depending on their range from the player, which keeps the dynamics interesting regardless on if you're firing away from a distance or getting down in the dirt as a melee survivor. The final boss is always a threat due to how Risk of Rain 2 handles its scaling. As mentioned before, the difficulty is increasing with each passing second, which guarantees the final boss to be a challenge regardless of how long you've put off facing him. There are of course the rare times when you've gotten an absurd amount of strong items in a short enough amount of time and are able to just dogwalk him but judging by the fact he is still responsible for my most deaths 500 hours in, I can verify this is the exception not the rule. I'd say all of his phases are engaging, with the possible exception of phase 4, his final phase. Without spoiling how it functions, I will say on some survivors they are substantially weaker against this phase than others depending on their kit, and even for those who can deal with it somewhat easily it's not the most engaging way to cap off the end to your run.
I'd be remiss to not mention the stunning soundtrack that accompanies this great game, but as this review is already quite lengthy, I will simply say that there is a reason Hopoo and later Gearbox have kept the same composer on since the first game and all of its subsequent DLCs (at the time of writing this.)
TLDR; Play Risk of Rain 2.