Risk of Rain 2‘s first DLC, Survivors of the Void, arrived as I mentioned in my “most anticipated games for 2022” list and I’m just incredibly stoked for it! For anyone that doesn’t know what Risk of Rain 2 is: Risk of Rain 2 is a 3rd-person Roguelike game where the time is your enemy. The game gets progressively harder as time goes on and you essentially kill enemies to earn gold to acquire items. I wrote a review on it in the past if you wanna check that out, and it’s one of my favourite games to date! Either way, the new DLC is HUGE and adds a lot of new mechanics, stages, enemies and items into the game, as well as two new characters, the Railgunner and the Void Fiend.
Important note: I won’t spoil too much from the game. Just some early-game items, maybe, but given that I didn’t play too much yet, I don’t know anything about the late game of Survivors of the Void! Also, if you play the game without the DLC and have someone in your group that has the DLC, you don’t need the DLC yourself. You will have access to the new stages, enemies, and items – just not the DLC-exclusive characters!
I played a little bit of it so far and I must say that the game got a lot more challenging with the DLC. That’s a great thing btw given that challenge is the whole appeal of Risk of Rain 2. By having the Survivors of the Void DLC installed, you automatically have the Railgunner unlocked. The Void Fiend, the second new survivor, needs to be unlocked by finishing wave 50 in the new wave-based alternate game mode or by completing a certain event and successfully beating a specific stage, that I actually know nothing about.
Frankly, Risk of Rain 2 has provided with me a lot of fun and challenges but all of this changes now with new items, new stages, new enemies, and honestly, a lot more incentives to not go for an “on-kill” build every time… I mean, I love that build but there are now other interesting interactions between some of the items. A new green item that was added into the green, for instance, prolongs burn effects on enemies and increases their damage, making Gasoline (a white item), as well as other burn effects, a lot more effective! Similarly, a new red item actually introduces the possibility for a missile-based build, which is something I definitely dig.
Monsoon runs have been incredibly fun with the new expansion given to the void-corruption spreading into the normal stages. So-called void seeds can be found spawning powerful void-themed enemies into the world and defeating them gives you really good rewards. At the same time, the Void Fields are no longer the go-to stage early on. Yes, they were rewarding and relatively easy to do before but now they appear to be a lot more dangerous and, frankly, deadly if you attempt them too early. On top of the void seeds, the game also got harder thanks to new stages and bosses, which is incredible!
Similarly, the game now has a whole new class of items, the void-corrupted items, which function in a unique way. For starters, if you take a bunch of bustling fungi, they heal you when you stand still. Well, if you take the void-corrupted version of that, it transforms all your bustling fungi into the void-version and it heals you when you sprint, which is quite interesting, in my opinion. Similarly, there are also new lunar, boss, red, green, orange and white items that all have interesting interactions with each other. One new addition that I absolutely love is a gun-like equipment that instantly kills a boss, dropping a boss item in the process on top of your other boss drop, which is frankly incredibly! The equipment gets used up though and you now have an equipment that just says “Ahoy” when you use it… and yes, that works with equipment drones, too!
I haven’t dived into the new stages too much so far and given that the difficulty increased so much, I haven’t made it to the final stages yet. I’m glad that the Sniper, uh,… I mean… “Railgunner” made it into the game. (I missed her from the first game…) I can’t wait to play more Risk of Rain 2 soon! If you wanna, stop by my stream today to see more of it as I’m gonna play a lot of it. :)
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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