 Hey all. I said at the end of my Sekiro video that I have something about how free DLC has ended up being kind of a disaster. And that script is done and ready to go, but as I was about to start recording it, Risk of Rain 2 released in Early Access, and I have been playing it constantly. So today we are going to do a really short video for a change. A little piece on Risk of Rain 2, after the logo. Alrighty. I enjoy roguelites. I like hugely popular ones like Isaac and Dead Cells. I like more niche ones like Synthetic, and I enjoy really super small ones like the First Risk of Rain or Streets of Rogue. I just really enjoy the genre. The First Risk of Rain is a good example of what I expect to get out of an indie roguelite. It didn't consume hundreds of hours like Isaac and Dead Cells, but it gave me a solid 30-40 hours of casual gameplay. I loved its graphics and its amazing music, and I really really loved that risk-reward time mechanic that the games based around. That being said, I fully admit it was a niche title. There's only a small audience for a side-scrolling 2D pixel-art roguelite game. Risk of Rain was good, but its production values held it back from a wider audience. Even with that though, there were still the two things that Risk of Rain did better than almost any other game in its genre. The aforementioned time mechanic, which we will discuss in a bit, and its item and power system was better than any other game in its class. Risk of Rain created so many insane synergies in its item drops that you could eventually become a swarming pixel of death that required you to merely walk across the screen and watch enemies explode into little pellets of health and gold and XP. Because the game had a final boss that you could beat, it had a bit less replay value than other games in its class, but at 20 bucks, it was a perfectly decent value. It might even have been less, man. Now that I'm thinking of it, I think it might have been $13.99. When I first saw that they were working on a sequel and that the sequel was a 3D version of the game, I was cautiously optimistic. Risk of Rain 2 I didn't find out about this game's early access for a couple days, but the second I saw it was out, I picked it up. The game has sold at least 250,000 copies, which must be somewhere between 4 and 5 times the amount of the first game, judging from the developer's response. Hapu Games might have really lucked out with this release window, as I'm sure there are many players like me having just finished a long run of high investment big budget games and looking for a light pallet cleanser to just have some fun. That was my expectation for this game. I figured it would do what the last game did and that I'd plunk down my 20 bucks and get 15 to 30 hours of a pretty good road bike game. Well, despite being priced in the same range as the first game, this game will now feature heavily in the video I'm writing about indie games and value. Risk of Rain 2 is a ridiculous steal at its current price. I've already played this game for almost 50 hours and it is immediately clear that this is a game I'm going to sink over 100 hours into. Let's find out why, starting with its art style. Risk of Rain 1 had a totally unique retro 8-bit pixel art look. This highly stylized art direction still made some tweaks for Modern Eyes, the most important of which was the shower of particle effects that erupted from defeated enemies that really couldn't happen back in the day, but other than that, it was pretty faithful reproduction. Still, even though the game was very simple, it had a way of delighting you. Not only were their backgrounds really beautiful and striking, but the enemies themselves were interesting to look at and it just felt good to hoover up XP and gold from the exploding corpses of your foes. Even with that though, the simple fact is that there was only so much immersion you can ring out of that art style. Dead Cells also had a retro art style, but it more references or evokes the 8-bit error than actually reproduces it. There were no games that looked like Dead Cells back in 1985, I promise you, but Risk of Rain was a very close and faithful reproduction of those old games for the most part. The interesting thing to note here is that this 2D, old school art style was basically the foundation of Risk of Rain, it's what made a lot of people buy it, so imagining the game in 3D with a more modern look was kind of difficult. Well, Risk of Rain 2 still evokes the old games by keeping polycounts lower than modern games, but the graphics other than that are thoroughly modern, while still completely referencing the first game. It is quite the achievement. Animations and particle effects and enemy counts are super high though, much higher than anything could possibly be back in the day. In fact, if you get in a good enough run, you will finally arrive at a point where Risk of Rain is pushing up against the limits of your machine. Either you all die, your machine will drop every other frame, or you will have a seizure. I cannot say enough good things about how good this game looks. Each of the levels that are currently in the game are totally distinct, all of them are beautiful to look at, and take a while to fully learn. They are big enough to feel like you're exploring them without being so big that the game gets impossible to wrap your head around. Even after you totally learn the maps, they're still really great to move through. Add to this is the absolutely fan-tastic enemy design. Many of the enemies and bosses from the first game make a return here, but seeing them in 3D is absolutely breathtaking. One of the more memorable bosses from Risk of Rain 1 was the Magma Worm. The first time I saw the sequels version of this boss burst out of the ground with my controller shaking and curl gracefully in the sky above me before crashing back down, man, it was awesome. Every creature from the first game is reimagined, redesigned from a smudge of pixels to a gorgeous, fully realized 3D model. Every enemy has unique and interesting attacks and unique variants, and each of them perfectly serve the gameplay, which is fantastic. Every boss is a unique fight, and there's something really awesome about starting a teleporter and waiting for the boss to spawn, wondering how many will pop up and which one it'll be. Particle effects are unbelievably awesome looking with attacks chaining together and enemies exploding. The playable characters all look distinct and an amazingly cool touch, player power is directly communicated through the character models. Every item you pick up ends up pasted to your avatar. I don't think there's even a criticism to be made about the look of the game, outside of the fact that the teleporter too easily blends into the background of some levels with it being a problem, particularly in the swamp and lava levels, but it's kind of an issue in all of them. If that was a gameplay decision, I don't really like it. And if it was an oversight, I think it should be changed. But either way, aside from that, Rescue Brain 2 is a gorgeous game and an unmitigated triumph of art direction, creature, boss, level and character design. It is perhaps the best example of evoking a retro feel while still looking completely modern. I'd go so far as to say it's utterly unique in that regard, and it's one of the better looking games around. As I've said, I enjoyed my time with Risk of Rain 1 before moving on. The basic gameplay loop of trying to explore a level to find the exit with enemies getting more and more powerful as time passed, but you also finding more powerful items was a really cool hook, man, really cool. The tension of saying, oh, I don't have that many good things, should I keep exploring or, man, I should just get out of here now before the boss gets too tough. It is perfect and totally unique, a really great mechanic. But while that was fun enough to play, the first game was also kind of passive, as what you really did was run around until you got enough auto damage and auto heal items so you could just watch things fall down dead around you. It was a reasonably fun, played a game, but it was missing the element that the genre leaders and rogue lights are built upon, that one last run hook. That something special that makes a bad run drive you to try again because you're angry and does the same after a good run because it's so cool. Risk of Rain 2 has totally captured that. And what's better is it has seamless, quick play co-op, a hugely important change from the first game which keeps things fresh. The first game had co-op, but it required like port forwarding and private matching, which meant for people who don't feel like going through a big to-do or who have no friends, that entire mode wasn't actually working. When I first heard that they were doing a co-op mode again, I remember thinking, eh, cool, I guess, but I'll never use it. But actually, this game's co-op is really great. The diversity in the toolkits amongst the characters really worked together in interesting ways and there's something just super fun about playing together and watching his teammates drop out. Last night, I ended up playing with some other guy until things got so insane, my game was about to crash and enemies could insta-kill us, which they eventually did. We had an hour and 30 minute run and it was just one of the best co-op moments I've had in years. The quick-play matchmaking is fast and if it doesn't work and only matches you in solo, it doesn't really matter all that much because it's still the same game. Currently, the game seems to be sort of endless with no final boss and I think it really works best like this. But even solo, the game is amazing to play and let's dig down on that for just a second and try to pin down what feels so unique and fresh here for me. One of the most important things in any game, and I've said this so many times, is that it has to feel good to move around and Risk of Rain 2 has separate character classes that all feel completely unique to move around. The characters move perfectly. I never felt like I'm getting hung up on something or like I'm dying because I don't have total control. Movement is smooth and snappy and sprinting and jumping just feels great. This is huge because the significant part of every game is just walking around the map. Hapu Games had to get movement to feel good and they absolutely nailed it. Player speed and sprint speed and jumping can all be upgraded with items so you start each run with just enough mobility to still feel good but eventually you can get to absurd levels of freedom of movement. It is so refreshing to see simple mobility addressed as a fun gameplay mechanic. I had a run where I got repeated sprint speed upgrades and was zipping about the map at ridiculous speeds. Just that was fun. I had a run with the engineer where I got six of the extra jump items. This allowed me to literally jump to the top of the level. It felt game breaking. Lots of things in this game feel game breaking and that is one of the keys to a great roguelite is allowing the player to break the game with upgrades. It's like the core hook of the genre. Whenever people talk to you about their Isaac runs, they don't mention when they got nothing but heart upgrades. They talk to you about their brimstone, Tammy's head and bended spoon runs. That's where the fun is. The true power of Risk of Rain 2 isn't that it has a tremendous number of items, which it does, and that almost all of them are good, which they are. It's that the system depends on dropping duplicate items that further power up those abilities. You can get an item that bleeds enemies on hit or you can get seven of those and watch as bosses simply die insanely fast. I killed the boss in nine seconds on a run where I stacked bleeding and electricity. This simple idea of duplicate items stacking up makes every single item awesome to get. There are almost no items that leave you going, damn. Everyone has played an Isaac or dead cells run and got nothing but garbage. That just doesn't happen in Risk of Rain 2 because the player is flooded in items on every level. It isn't a matter of finding a needle and a haystack powerful item. It's finding multiple copies of one item or diverse set of powerful items that combine in absurd ways. You can end up with burn, bleed, and chain electricity on enemies and also let enemies explode on death and also that they release seeking daggers that chain into other daggers. It gets bonkers and it is insanely addictive and absolutely brilliant. I'm gushing, I know, but I honestly think this is the new standard for roguelites. It's as if Papu Games identified everything that led to annoying runs in previous titles and said, yeah, but does it have to be that way? This doesn't mean the game is easy either. The mechanic of enemies getting denser and more powerful in a linear fashion each minute is still here, which means that all the time you are searching for items, your enemies are growing in number and strength. The game balance is tied around the RNG of where chests are. If you start a run with five chests right around you, you are in good shape, but you'll have another run where you spend three minutes searching only to find two drones that you can't afford yet. Likewise, the game's difficulty settings are, exactly like the first game, extremely cleverly implemented. The easy, normal, and hard difficulties only change one thing. They start you further along the enemy timeline. Easy is a great place to learn how to play because you have a five minute head start. Normal is on the money and difficulty. It feels great. Hard, the enemies are already five minutes ahead of you when you first land. It is a great system, man. My son has already fallen in love with this game and moved from easy to normal. I find the game well balanced on normal. I've kept it there. And I'm sure I'll try hard soon, but I haven't yet. I've just been having a great time just playing it on normal. Item and character locks are consistent across the first 40 hours for me, although the last two characters are a little cumbersome to unlock, but no big deal at all. With unbelievably fun combat. Great mobility. Perfect enemies, bosses, and items. What's here? Right now in Early Access is one of my favorite games in quite some time. I absolutely love it. I assume it controls great with the mouse and keyboard, but I play most games on Steam Link in my bedroom, so I've used a controller and had no issues at all. Performance is perfect. Absolutely perfect until you've been playing so long that the game starts groaning under the pile of enemies and explosions, but it's that rare performance drop that actually feels good when you're so powerful that the game is kind of breaking. It actually feels pretty awesome. Risk of Rain 2 is currently 20 bucks in Early Access. It has enough levels, items, and enemies to easily fuel 50 hours of gameplay, and I will be playing quite a bit more than that on positive. It has six characters right now that all feel different and are all equally fun to play. The developers have more levels and more characters and items planned and will be rolling them out over time, but what's here right now is a totally complete, perfectly functioning, finished, excellent game. If development ceased tomorrow, the game would be underpriced by like 30%. With Hollow Knight and Dead Cells, it is one of the very best values in gaming and one of the year's best, as is right now. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying this game and thinking they got more than their money's worth, and it is so nice to play a game and have literally zero substantive complaints. It's been ages since I did that. Dead Cells and Hollow Knight were like the last two games I played and found nothing to moan about. Risk of Rain 2 is as good as those games. It is an instant indie classic and everyone who owns a PC should buy it now. Good games need to be rewarded. All right, we'll be back to our usual programming of me being cranky and annoyed next time. Thanks for coming, bye.