Risk of Rain Returns Review (Hilden13)
Is the game bad? It's Risk of Rain 1, so no, it's not "bad".
The game itself is fine. It's "OK". It's RoR, with a fresh coat of paint, some new tracks, more items, enemies and stage variants. There's even character specific trials to get into, which are all neat and get you to explore their new abilities or a part of their kit in an interesting way. So what could be the problem?
The game wasn't remade from the ground up. No one expected it to, mind you, but here a lot of the jank, bugs, crashes and such from the first game were just not addressed or fixed. The net code for multiplayer, although it crashes less, is still horrendous in runs that last over 40 minutes. You cannot rejoin mid-run, so you can kiss that 1-2 hour run you were having with your friends goodbye. This wouldn't be such a pain point if it didn't happen every single time. The lobby browser for this game is desert most of the time, so don't expect being able to play with randos.
On top of that, a lot of QoL stuff we've come to expect from Hopoo / RoR2 is just entirely missing in this title. No pinging, meaning no communication to your teammates past 25 minutes when it gets too hectic, can't share items, points of interest, only the teleporter is marked on everyone's maps when someone gets close to it. Don't play on anything other than 1x zoom size unless you're okay missing out on information: you'll have to deal with everything looking tiny. However, it's hard reading pixel art graphics when all the pixels are 1:1 on your screen, so you'll have to deal with that, too.
Speaking of maps: they're beautiful and their design is really great. The variants are interesting. They're a lot bigger, too. Problem is, the same amount of chests as the first game spawn: unless you're playing with friends, now items are spread out extremely thin across the map. Unless you get mobility early on or are playing as one of only a handful of characters, you can hit restart most of the time by the time you reach the third, sometimes second stage.
Playing rainstorm or monsoon is legitimately near impossible without a lot of early game luck for most of the cast of characters. Out of all the things that were change, the way elites deal damage has been changed, so expect to lose nearly all your health from elites being barely within restraining order range and others that can just teleport to you. The damage you take ramps up very, very fast. This means that unless you're picking items to make a glass cannon, you'll be sent back to character selection real fast. In the first game you could make tank build last a couple hours at least, provided you knew what you were doing and committed to it.
Unfortunately, it looks like all of this will absolutely never be addressed, seeing as the game received exactly 2 bug patching updates, zero balance changes and just a little bit of QoL / accessibility, and the devs have been silent about this game for months otherwise. To be clear, I'm not looking for content updates: I just want the game to feel polished beyond the pretty pixel art. Outside of the items, characters, trials and enemies, absolutely nothing has improved from the first game, and a lot of it has just gotten worse.
Review will be updated whenever any of this gets fixed. If the flow of the game gets adjusted to feel better and the greater majority of characters don't feel like I'm handicapping myself on purpose because I can't cross the map in a few seconds at level one, then it'll be back to positive. If you're looking for a risk of rain game, play the original or 2. If you need more of the first game, this could scratch your itch but the game likely won't hold your interest anymore once you've seen most of the new items.