Risk of Robin (3)

            Hey y’all, it’s been a little bit! More than 2 months, but I’d like to get back into the swing of things with a new review, one that’s been cooking for wayyyyyy too long. Like 2 months too long. It’s a little overcooked to be honest, but that’s a different game (I like to think I’m pretty funny). In any case, lets get back to it. Today’s review is a game that is in the strange category of “sequels that outstripped their original iterations,” – Risk of Rain 2. Now that’s not to say that Risk of Rain (hereby differentiated with RoR2 and RoR1) wasn’t popular, but we’ll get into some opinion with that later. Let’s take it from the top like we usually do with some historical contextery.

            Historical: Inches of Rain in Years Past

            RoR2 was released in early August of 2020, and is a doozy of a game. The thing is chock-full of secrets and items and lore and enemies and bosses and… to be honest its just kinda chock-full of everything. Especially secrets. Hopoo games, the developing studio was founded in 2012, but the actual game (RoR1) was initially developed by two students from the University of Washington, Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse. RoR2 took 3 years to develop, from 2017 to final release in 2020, but as far as I can see, RoR1 was both of their first games – they worked on one in between, called Deadbolt, which closely follows the small pixel size and bit depth of RoR1, so their leap to 3d in RoR2 was, in short, a massive development (but we’ll talk later about how this isn’t actually a big thing in terms of mechanical differences). Unfortunately, due to the lack of background before RoR1, I can’t do nearly as much context about the creators as I’d like to without going out of order with the planned sequence of this review.

            Something a bit strange though: we had a lot of games released around the same time – games that are, yes, probably more well known by the average person than RoR2, but on that list, taken from manofmany.com [https://manofmany.com/entertainment/gaming/top-video-games-and-release-dates-for-august-2020] we notably have some big games in popular culture, such as Horizon Zero Dawn (Complete

Edition, original released in 2017), Fall Guys, and Madden 21. Out of the complete list, I’ve only seen those three and a couple more on that list that have even remotely stuck around. RoR2 isn’t even on that list – it’s an indie game, published by Gearbox publishing. RoR2 doesn’t even sit on the homepage anymore, unsurprisingly, as it came out 3 years ago, but let’s compare. Madden 21 is probably the most well known in what I’ll dub “generalized gaming circles” – people who play pretty much only sports games, or only play games with friends (a huge market to be sure). Horizon Zero Dawn was a single player AAA game – released by Sony, and enjoyed a good amount of advertising as such. Fall Guys was one of the hottest party games of the time – free to play, play as a squad of friends, capitalizing off the battle-royale style of Fortnite, and off the cutesy bean-shaped artwork of games like amogus sus (Among Us)(in case that wasn’t clear).

Three years later (at the time of writing this June 19^th, 2023), Risk of Rain 2 – again an indie title, outstrips all of these on nearly every metric besides FALL GUYS peak number of players of all time (by about 100,000, so not something to sneeze at for sure). However, RoR2 has nearly double Fall Guys active players today sitting at nearly 7.3k active players, has more than a +3000 player gap in 24-hour peak, and enjoys a NINETY-FIVE percent positive review rate, the runner up being HZD at only eighty-six! We’ll touch on this a little later with a bunch of caveats, but in only three years, some of the most popular, or at least the most well-known games on that list being completely outdone by an indie title is extremely impressive to say the least.  

As you may have noticed, we’re departing from “Historical Context” and such things with similarly boring names into metrics and figures, but worry not dear reader, now we’ll get into what you obviously came here for – totally unbiased, and factual, opinions and conjecture.

Feel the Rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you

So, when you load into RoR2, you’re greeted with a cutscene that I’ve never once watched, with absolute certainty that most of the friends I play with did the exact same thing: press the space bar and load into the menu. Immediate caveat, I have to say that RoR2’s story isn’t bad, in fact the lore is expansive, and from what I’ve seen, it’s a fun little insert into a roguelike – obviously a genre that really lent itself to story from Hades, but very few other games do, or even can do what Hades does.

This game is drastically different visually from RoR1 – at least at first glance. I mean, just take into account the fact that RoR1 was a 2d platformer, and RoR2 is entirely 3d, with a TON of spatial traversing mechanics, and the fact that you’re using the over the shoulder controls is an entirely different way of playing shooters in the first place-

And its at this point that I have to admit – I never played RoR1 until I had played many hours of RoR2. Not only that, but I don’t think I’ve beat RoR2 solo on any difficulty except “Drizzle” which is, following the types of rain naming convention they use, the easiest difficulty. This ends up being a prime example of how strange it was that this game blew up the way it did – I’d only heard of RoR1 in passing when first getting introduced to RoR2, just that this game was a sequel of some sort, and RoR2 is a fucking hard game to play. It’s so incredibly fun, but getting anywhere without a wiki, or at least friends to show you how to unlock things is essentially a pipe dream. There’s simply too much to cover inside the game, with extremely esoteric ways to unlock them.

For example, one “artifact” inside the game (essentially a modification to the ruleset, oftentimes drastically changing the playstyle) is unlocked by: finding a code on the top levels of one of three random starting stages, finding the place to input that code on the fourth stage, going to a tiny little laptop asset near the input, and then finishing a secret stage. “Oh Robin, that’s not that bad. How many relics are there?” – and therein lies the problem. THERE ARE SIXTEEN DIFFERENT RELICS. Just getting past the first couple stages when you’re first starting out is a nightmare – you die so often, the enemies do literally 2 hit kills, and they just keep coming babeyyy. On top of that: if you find these organically, you don’t know what they do until you unlock them – and some of them suck to play with. Almost all of them make the game harder in some way, and some of them are straight up player-killing zingers, and don’t even get me started on literally the other ¾ of the secrets stored in the game.

But back to the change between RoR1 and RoR2, and away from the git gud moments. See, initially, RoR2 is insanely different then RoR1 – again the added dimension adds so much to visibility changes, new items, new characters. However upon playing both of them, there’s a moment when you see that the core gameplay loop has not changed. Find the teleporter, shoot enemies, avoid the inevitable near-oneshot, and loot on the way. Go through that 4 times, kill the boss.

So with all my complaining about RoR2, and how it’s not that different from RoR1 essentially, why did RoR2 take off so much? I think that there are a lot of complicated factors that go into it, but essentially, it boils down to three reasons in my opinion.

• RoR2 functions as a standalone game. Even though there are definitely some players who migrated from RoR1 to RoR2, RoR2 can essentially be defined as a different game entirely, that really doesn’t depend on any of the narrative, mechanics, or knowledge gained in RoR1. Because of that, you can attract new players, ones who would normally never be interested in RoR1, and that paired with
• The resurgence of roguelikes makes for a game that’s immediately addictive and relevant. Roguelikes and rogue-lites have been making a comeback for a while, and something that people (and especially streamers) can sink their teeth into for hours of content really drives that home. Finally,
• 3d simply appeals to a different demographic than 2d. Take for example Hollow Knight, one of the most popular and well-known indie metroidvanias. Now pit that against one of the most popular and well-known over the shoulder 3d games: Fortnite. I think this ends up being a pretty clear comparison. Risk of Rain 2 capitalizes off this whether intentionally or not.

All in all, Risk of Rain 2 is a fantastic game. I had fun playing it, and maybe you will too. Shoot some enemies, find some secrets, die a lot, risk some rain.