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Risk of Rain 2 is - at the time of writing - sitting at about 11,500 user-generated reviews on Steam. Its total rating? Overwhelmingly positive. A rare sight for any game, let alone an out-of-the-blue Early Access release, but this success wasn’t made possible a vacuum. This article is going to try to compare and contrast the game with its legendary predecessor to see what is it that’s new and changed, and what has stayed the same.
For some additional context, Risk of Rain 2 was released six long years ago following the unexpected success of the original Risk of Rain - a game that quickly earned the status of cult classic back in its heyday. Hopoo Games, the developers of Risk of Rain, took a quick detour from ROR with Deadbolt: another brutal side-scroller that did not mechanically depart much from the basic blueprint provided by Risk of Rain. This made Hopoo’s jump from 2D to full 3D that much more drastic in comparison. That said, while the chief difference between Risk of Rain and Risk of Rain 2 may lie in the games’ choices of perspective, there’s other stuff to talk about, too.
Due to the fact that a whole lot of players spent a whole lot of time with Risk of Rain, it seems to have been obvious to the developers that Risk of Rain 2 had to share much of its DNA with its direct predecessor. This is interesting because a surprising amount of ROR’s core features made their way into ROR 2, and all of them seem to have translated to 3D very, very well.
Virtually every element of Risk of Rain had a special twist to it that made the game slightly different than all other contemporary rogue-lites. The game’s difficulty, for example, was maintained not with the player progressing through levels, but rather by the amount of time they’ve spent playing a round. Similarly, the characters and their skills weren’t customisable at all, featuring MOBA-like abilities that players had to learn how to work with on the fly. All of this mashed together made for a unique experience, where each character had a very specific rhythm to their gameplay.
Now, while ROR was a side-scrolling action platformer, ROR 2 is a fully-fledged third-person shooter, and for the developers to successfully translate these elements from one genre to the other, while still making everything very recognisable to fans of the original, is nothing short of impressive.
The core of what Hopoo accomplished with Risk of Rain 2 definitely lies in maintaining a rhythmic gameplay experience, with a few dedicated skills driving the player forward, but the itemisation is back as well, and with numerous upgrades, too. Players can now - for example - see every item they pick up equipped on their character, with their designs growing more ominous and busy as each run progresses further.
It is also interesting that Risk of Rain 2’s visual style manages to remind you of the original game’s minimalistic take on everything. There, the sense of scale was conveyed through the immense difference between how tiny your character was compared to everything else, and while this is pretty much still the case with ROR 2, the third dimension added a whole lot to the game’s atmosphere that could never be communicated in a side-scroller.
The most impressive feature of Risk of Rain, then, might not be anything it’s doing on its own, but rather how faithfully it adapts its predecessor in pretty much every way that counts. This is no small feat, considering the complexity of the original, but Hopoo seem to be up to the task, and with Risk of Rain 2 still in Early Access, there’s a whole lot more coming our way in the future.
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