Risk of Rain 2 isn't the type of game I would normally be interested in, but I gave it a chance, and I got hooked.

100% of achievements earned in 174 hours of play.



In Risk of Rain 2 you start as your chosen survivor, landing on a bizarre planet. For the entirety of your run, you will be fighting for your life. As with other roguelikes, there's a number of commonalities you can expect to see: upgrades to pick up, a horde of enemies to fight, a boss to cap off each level. However, unlike many other roguelikes, the levels aren't procedurally generated (but the sequence of the levels do vary somewhat). As you complete achievements, new items and artifacts become unlocked and useable for future runs.

You can spend hours playing a run, or beat the game in under 1.5 hours. You are largely playing the same 20 levels over and over, but the way in which you play within each run varies. This variability and versatility is what gives it such a strong replay value.


RoR2 is not an easy game. Sometimes you find a good combination of items; sometimes you don't. Sometimes, you juke left when you should have juked right, and you're dead. RNG hits pretty hard and regularly crushes you. Despite this seemingly frustrating description of the difficulty, I implore you to stick with it. Play on easy mode for a while. Learn how the items interact with each other. As you start unlocking new items, characters, and artifacts, your possibilities branch out, and the enjoyment goes up. Default RoR2 will always be hard (and darn near impossible on the hardest difficulty, "Monsoon"), but after the first several runs, I almost never played it "default" from that point forward. I always played it with some combination of artifacts, most importantly the "command" artifact. This single artifact changed the game for me, as it gives you much greater control over how you upgrade your character.

Besides the base difficulty you set for the run, there's an enemy difficulty scale within the run, which slowly increases over time. It creates quite the interesting dilemma: Complete the levels quicker to ensure the enemies you fight don't get too hard, or spend more time collecting items to make your character more powerful. It's a delicate balance you must continuously maintain, because if you swing too far in one direction or the other, you're dead. Keep in mind this a general rule. As you experiment with other artifacts and game modes, you'll notice that some rules go out the window. It's a design that broadens the more you play it.


One drawback to the continuously scaling difficulty, is that you don't get much time to plan. You're always on the run. You can't view your inventory when paused, and in multiplayer, you can't even pause the game! The only exception is when you choose to go to the shop between levels. This will be a drawback for those that like to do a little more planning with their roguelikes. Better take a bathroom break before starting a run with your buddies!


Throughout each stage you'll pick up items to boost your character during a run. Duplicate items can be stacked (e.g. each additional 'boiler plate' you pick up gives you +5 more damage reduction). Items often synergize with other items (e.g. an item that gives you extra crit hit chance + an item that gives you some benefit every time you crit hit). This is the foundation of much of the versatility of RoR2. When you're playing "default" RoR2, it is possible to get bad loadouts. Some items are lame and almost completely useless. But most items are at least useful in certain combinations or contexts.

There are over 100 different items and equipment. It will take a while to learn what they all are, and how they help (or even hurt you). To make it harder, the items are sometimes nonsensical in their effects. A ukulele? Well, that zaps adjacent enemies with electricity, of course! A slug? That increases your heal rate, naturally!


I was pleasantly surprised that in certain modes, this game doesn't hold you back. Your character can be grossly overpowered. I even pushed it so insanely far as to cause my PC to crash. I love that it lets me do this without limits. It's a refreshing contrast to the thousands of games out there that throttle you back just as you feel like you're gaining some momentum. Sometimes it's fun to simply annihilate boatloads of enemies with little effort. However, in most other modes, there's a great deal of balancing mechanisms, where if you are getting too overpowered, it can come back to haunt you.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3040922317

It's really hard to sum up all the different angles and strategies for such a seemingly straightforward design. Even 100 hours into the game, I was still discovering new ways to do things, and new ways to combine items for specific effects. You'll frequently be referring to the very extensive wiki to refine your understanding of every item and character.


Despite being known as a co-op game, I didn't find the co-op portion to be that strong. It was ok, but I mostly preferred solo mode.

Some downsides to co-op:

• You're mostly competing for items.
  
• Not many items synergize well with other teammates, and the ones that do are neither great nor essential.
  
• If you're not coordinating closely with a teammate, they may cause you to fail the conditions for earning an achievement you were after. This is actually a bigger deal in this game, because all achievements are tied to unlocking items, abilities and characters.
  
• The base difficulty is harder in co-op than in solo mode.

Having said that, there are some benefits for playing co-op:

• Teammates are helpful when you're inexperienced. It definitely makes ramping up easier.
  
• A few achievements are easier if you have a teammate.
  
• You get to respawn for free on the next level (as long as at least one teammate is alive to complete the current level).
  
• Any items that are unlocked for one player are unlocked for all during that session.

The soundtrack is absolutely amazing. I would even say it contributed significantly to how much I enjoy the game. I bought the OST at full price.


It took me 174 hours to get all achievements. There are some challenges that you can do that aren't related to achievements. For example the "logbook" which requires you to basically encounter every possible item and enemy. I completed logbook entries after my 200th hour of game time.

As mentioned earlier, the achievements are all tied to unlocking items, which I think is a great way to add significance to achievements. You not only earn the achievement, but get a new character/weapon/item for doing so.

The goals for every achievement are quite different, and will require you to pursue various combinations of items to get there. Some goals will mean you have to forgo getting normally helpful items that you typically want to use every run. The achievements often require such radically different approaches that the 118 achievements don't feel that grindy. Difficult yes, but not grindy.

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I HIT IT ANYWAY.

I am a 45 yo father, probably one of the oldest people playing this game. I am a single father to my Son, who is 14 now. My son got this game for Christmas in 2021 from his uncle, so we installed it on his computer and he started playing. By the end of the week he had 24 hours on this game. This was horrible for me, as it was already hard for me to find ways to spend time with my son, as he is always out with his friends or just watching YouTube. So i decided to make a Steam account and get this game to see if I could maybe play alongside him. I loaded into the game, picked my character and world and started playing but I was stuck on what you where supposed to do. I asked my Son for help and he hosted a game for me to join. I loved it as it was the best time I had spent with my Son since my wife had died. This game has ever since brought me and my son closer again and now we actually spend time together outside the house together as well. This game reminded me that there's fun to be had in everything, and it has brought both me and my Son many happy memories.