I love Risk of Rain 2. I actually love it so much that I have put 540 hours into the game. The DLC was released at the end of August, and I really only put in a few hours, and I never went back. I want to talk about what I liked and disliked about the newest expansion.

LIKES:

• It gave me a reason to play more Risk of Rain 2.
• The Seeker character is the most interesting of the bunch. Having an actual multiplayer-focused character really mixes it up.
• The new artifact is fun to use.
• The new skins for completing the game are ALL pretty dope-looking.
• New enemy variants are cool, except for the child (noted why down below).
• Only two items are fun to use, and the rest are not so much.
• The new equipment is fine. Everyone likes a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

DISLIKES: Pretty much 90% of the DLC

• 16 items were introduced, and 14 of them are irrelevant. A lot of the time, I just tried to get rid of them.
  • Some items try to introduce new keywords that, upon looking them up, just add unwanted depth to the game.
    • I don’t want to have a 5% chance of OVERSPILL which is like big damage times 5% above 100% of some dumb shit.
  • I don’t want to read a paragraph of text for a useless ability.
  • A chance to knock enemies into the air is fodder scrap for better items.
• The new areas are either really small with no area to explore or incredibly large with nothing to explore.
  • The Treeborn Colony is the most useless space in the game. It has 4 little islands to jump on and the teleporter. That’s it.
  • Helminth Hatchery is a cool space, but it is so large that exploring it becomes a waste of time if you are playing to beat the game.
  • The Prime Meridian is just a boss rush that you avoid to get to the main boss.
• The False Son Boss Fight is such a stupid fight.
  • They figured that enemy spam attached to an already powerful enemy was a good idea.
  • The unavoidable laser attack that is a guaranteed death.
    • So fun.
• The False Son playable character is slow, clunky, and dies incredibly easily.
  • I tried so hard to play him, and it is just so boring.
• The Chef may be really good for his health regen recipe passively, but he is just a plain, no-depth character.
  • kill, to recipe and get health, rinse and repeat.
• The Child just shoots and runs. Just a lazy emeny type that requires the player to just ignore it and move onto actually playing the game.

This was Gearbox’s chance to take an IP they bought and do something with it, and it just turned out to be a shoddy, lazy, boring DLC. Characters have cardboard-cut-out depth, the items are borderline useless except for a couple, the main titular boss fight is just enemy spam, and the environments are just plain fucking boring.

It’s a real shame that the DLC turned out to be this way. Risk of Rain Two is one of my favorite roguelikes ever made, and I remember it fondly, but with this update and the content provided, it just makes it slump into a slog to play.

I guess it’s time to retire from the game.

4/10