Recent reviews by Top Cat | Sponsored by Yayo

Multiplayer hasn't worked for the week I've owned the game. If you want this for multiplayer just forget about it.

The game is essentially a GTA clone like Saints Row or any of those other driving games. Not worth the money.

play borderlands 2 instead

Only gameplay is press E, dialogue somehow even worse than the base game.

Masterpiece.

One of the most overrated games on Steam. A generic, excessively grindy survival game that's been done a million times over and brings nothing new to the table. It's so poorly optimised you'll need to lower the graphics until it looks like a PS1 game. Its only redeeming quality is that it isn't Rust.

Doesn't fit with the xcom style at all.

No Steam cloud support and no way of skipping the tutorial.

Don't bother.

Risk of Rain is confused. It doesn’t know if it wants to be an action game, a survival game, or something else.

From the footage as advertised on the Steam page, it would appear that Risk of Rain is an action game. Don’t let this fool you; although the action elements in the game are enjoyable, they are let down by the survival elements forced into the game.

The survival elements have really left a sour taste in my mouth; the most obvious of these being the way you have to scavenge for items. There isn’t a shop in which you can purchase any item you please, instead the items are randomly generated throughout the map. This makes managing your money very difficult, and brings in a very unfair luck element into the game.

Although the scavenging was a poor design decision, my major gripe with the game is the permanent death, of which I feel was forced into the game just as an excuse to add another survival element. I always end up messing up on the second level, and due to the permanent death, I’m forced to re-play the first level over and over again. The worst part about this is the fact that winning a level is heavily weighted on luck, due to the item spawns being random.

To top off an already flawed game, I’ve noticed that some elements of the game are broken. The difficulty of the game is either bugged or fundamentally flawed; you’re able to select a difficulty on the menu screen, however when the game starts there is also a difficulty meter on the screen, which changes throughout the game. I selected the difficulty before the game started, I want the game to stick to that difficulty!

Risk of Rain has to be one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever played. Partially due to the many flaws in the game, but mostly because I feel that there is so much hidden potential locked behind the survival elements; if these were to be stripped out of the game, I’d honestly feel that we’d have a very good indie game.

I purchased the game whilst it was on sale, and even at a reduced price, I would not recommend you buy the game. I want to love the game, but unfortunately I cannot whilst the game is in this state.

Be very careful when deciding whether or not you should buy this game. I’ve purchased it and found it to be a massive let-down. The game has a distinct lack of features, is very difficult to learn, and is a very frustrating game to play.

The game extremely confusing to play; upon joining a server for the first time, I found it impossible to find any enemies. I searched the map for at least 15 minutes before being taken out by a sniper in the distance. Upon re-spawning, I didn’t have any issues finding enemies; however, I did have issues killing them. Every time I ran towards the enemy lines, I would just get gunned down every time. This was a very frustrating experience; because I am used to other similar games (such as Call of Duty) I was using the normal tactic commonly found in COD. This, for whatever reason, is not effective in Red Orchestra 2, and instead you must camp and wait for enemies to come into your line of sight. The most frowned upon “tactic” used in Call of Duty is the only valid tactic in Red Orchestra 2. In my opinion, that is just due to lazy game design.

Something else which I found to be extremely stupid is that not everyone can have access to an automatic weapon. Instead, most players on the server are forced to use a bolt action rifle against their will. This is not only a bad game design choice (since we are forced to use a weapon that we might not want to use), but it also doesn’t make any sense from a realistic point of view. If both sides had access to automatic weapons, wouldn’t they arm all of their soldiers with them? Doesn’t make any sense to use the out-dated weaponry.

I also was disappointed to find that this game is set in the olden days. I find that modern warfare is much more exciting, strategic and enjoyable to play. There are a larger variety of weapons to choose from, alongside a diverse range of vehicles to choose from. I think that the game should have implemented both “olden day” and “modern day” game modes, at least in doing this there would be some variety in the game.

My final point is regarding the kill feed. There seems to be a glitch with the kill feed, in the sense that there is a delay between getting a kill and the kill appearing on the kill feed. In superior titles (such as COD), the kill feed can be used as a means of checking to see if the enemy is dead. For example, if an enemy is in the distance, you can fire a few rounds at the enemy, and then simply check the kill feed to see if they are dead. In Red Orchestra 2, the enemy will often lie down after being shot at. It then becomes very difficult to tell if you have killed the enemy or not, which is often misleading. Fixing the kill feed bug will fix this issue, but the devs do not seem interested in fixing it.

Whatever you do, stay away from Red Orchestra 2. It’s nowhere near as good as others are saying it is. There are a magnitude of poor design decisions which have made this game unplayable. Avoid!