Risk of Rain Review

Then again, depending on how good you are at discerning the handful of pixels that represent your character from a chaotic maelstrom of flailing enemies and explosions, you may quickly learn to appreciate the sight of a blank patch of ground. Yes, Risk of Rain just loves to pile on the enemies in the later stages of the game, gradually increasing both the number and strength of your foes until even the mini-bosses are showing up in string quartets. It's actually not a bad idea and, as games like Serious Sam have demonstrated, it can be an absolute wheeze to emerge victorious from a battle having mini-gunned down enough morally-deficit foes to populate a reasonably sized moon. Risk of Rain fumbles this premise, however, and fighting in the later levels often turns into just holding down the 'attack' button with your back against a wall and hoping your assorted arsenal of missiles, mortars, laser beams, magic missiles and whirring blades is enough to liquidise the armies of Lord Antagonist before they can break through your shields. It's still sort of gratifying to carve murderous swathes through everything the game can throw at you (maniacal laughter optional) but once the red mist wears away it quickly becomes apparent that all you're doing is mindlessly grinding your way towards your objective. I wouldn't say the change of pace left me disappointed, but I did profoundly miss the twitchy side-scrolling survival challenge that the game had quietly dropped somewhere around the time I acquired my fourth shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.

Let's go back to that replayability. There are, ooh, ten characters in total, and the whole business of unlocking them is essentially your main motivation to keep playing once the game's novelty wears off. Each one is fairly unique with their own thematic set of four skills, in a startling nod to Dota-likes of all things, and it's fair to say you'll eventually find a favourite. It'd just be nice if Risk of Rain wasn't so bloody tight-lipped about how to actually go about unlocking them. Sure, you might fulfil the criteria for some of them by accident – like, say, collecting fifteen monster logs – but some hinge entirely on you finding secret areas or completing specific objectives, which seems a little bit obtuse considering that the game does its utmost to hide the existence or such things from you. The only hint is a set of unmarked achievements in one of the deeper menus. Might as well just write them in a Caesar cypher while you're at it, guys. I mean, you have the creative freedom to get away with it.

Multiplayer? Yeah, it's kind of like this paragraph: tacked on, but at least functional. Being a straight copy-paste of the single player campaign with extra players sounds just dandy on paper, especially if you wanted to try one of the more technical characters without getting flattened under a golem's wayward fist, but without any alterations to the difficulty the game becomes shockingly easy. I waltzed through the whole thing on roller-skates three times with only a single ally in tow, so if you desperately need to see all three anticlimactic seconds of the ending cutscene or really, really want to unlock the Sniper for some insane reason, then this is the mode for you. For everybody else, it bleaches the fun from the experience and I would sooner recommend being introduced to the Harry Potter books in reverse order. There's no server browser either, but I'm not sure that's much of a problem considering that there's zero reason to play this with anybody except an organised group of friends.

You can probably already hear the laborious thrums of a recommendation for Risk of Rain somewhere off-screen if you've been paying attention, so I won't waste time foreshadowing it, but I must warn you that this thumbs-up is a somewhat limp-wristed one. Yes, it's creative and original and essentially well-designed, barring one or two minor quirks, and I suppose for a measly ten dollars that's all you could really ask for, but in spite of its colourful log entries it's still a bit dry and characterless all over, like having a digestive biscuit with your tea. It really does feel like something of a quintessential indie game for the world of today, checking boxes and measuring out appropriate doses of creativity with businesslike care. Mm-hm, roguelike elements. Mm-hm, original combination of hitherto never conjoined gameplay ideas. Mm-hm, pixel art and chirpy music done by somebody with a trendy Bandcamp page. Maybe being dissatisfied with a completely adequate indie game just because it doesn't slap me in the face with something that's totally off the rails is just another marker of my descent into beardy obscurity, but until then I feel duty-bound to tell you that Risk of Rain is basically alright. Night night.