izigame.me

I have mixed feelings about this game, especially as someone who's put a ton of time into Risk of Rain 2, and still enjoys firing that game up now and then. The aesthetic aspects of this game are pretty top-notch, the animations and everything give this game so much more personality than Risk of Rain 2. I was pretty addicted to it at first, but after a while it started to feel like I wasn't actually getting better at the game, I was just gambling until I happened to get the right combination of items. I say this after even finishing several runs on both Rainstorm and Monsoon with Huntress, Commando, Pilot, Mercenary, and Sniper.
Here's why I think that. It's significantly more difficult than Risk of Rain 2 and the timer matters so much more, and yet many maps are incredibly huge, which encourages you to get going to the next stage instead of exploring and looting more thoroughly. There are good improvements to many items that have carried over to this game, and cool and interesting new items, but generally speaking, items feel much less impactful, especially when it comes to damage. To make things worse, you don't have mechanics like scrap and 3D printers to combat the RNG and improve the lacking aspects of your build. There's no proc chaining like in 2 either, which if you don't know basically involves items triggering other items, resulting in huge amounts of screen-wiping damage. With all these factors at play, I found myself struggling to deal enough damage to survive most of my runs. Attaining that feeling of being overpowered and unstoppable is so much more difficult to do, I think to this game's detriment.
One thing that allowed you to combat the RNG and the timer in Risk of Rain 2 was your ability to avoid attacks. Even if you didn't have a ton of mobility items, you would have three dimensions and cover from various objects to avoid attacks, and many characters also had a get-of-jail-free card in the form of a mobility or invulnerability skill that you could rely on to get out of a sticky situation. But if you're not lucky enough find mobility in Returns (which happened to me pretty often), you have very few options. Your base run speed very slow, your jump height is very low, there's platforms but you're often fighting on completely flat surfaces with nothing to protect you from enemies or projectiles, and your get-of-jail-free card is often extremely lacking, either because you can barely use it due to a long cooldown timer, or because it barely takes you anywhere (like Huntress' Blink).
While I applaud Hopoo for getting creative with item and ability unlocks through Providence Trials (this is very similar to Smash Bros. Melee's Event mode), I found many of them frustrating. The unlock challenges are also a lot more character-specific than in 2, so as someone who hates playing characters like Engineer, I'll be left out of potentially hugely helpful items in my runs just because I don't enjoy playing certain characters (even knowing this I still can't be bothered). I don't like being forced into a particular play style, or feeling like I have to do something that feels like a chore in order to unlock something. (Meanwhile, I've stuck to the characters I like in 2 the entire time and I have basically every item unlocked). Some challenges are also unreasonably difficult, like the Miner challenge to unlock Shattering Justice. This is a problem that I wish Hopoo had learned from 2, with absurd and frustrating challenges like Mercenary's Ethereal and Commando's Incorruptible marring an otherwise great game.
I hesitate to give this game a thumbs-down, especially Hopoo clearly put a lot of effort and care into this. It's absolutely not a bad game, don't get me wrong. The 50-ish hours of playtime I've got out of it is great value from a $14.99 game as well. But that being said, once I beat this game on Monsoon with a few characters, my enthusiasm for it died a lot. I rarely think about coming back to it even though there are still plenty of things to unlock because the runs often feel like a slog, and like I mentioned earlier, the game generally feels like more of a gamble than a test of skill. In hindsight, I think the challenge I set for myself to beat Monsoon was really the main reason why I kept playing, and that I stopped having fun with it much earlier. The fact that a lot of Risk of Rain channels on YouTube have gone right back to Risk of Rain 2 after just a few months, despite this being a much more recent release I think says a lot.
If you haven't played Risk of Rain 2 yet, I would recommend trying that out first. If you've played 2 and you're interested, then you'll get some fun out of it, as long as you understand that it's going to be a somewhat different experience. It just doesn't have the same replayability or fun factor that 2 had in my opinion.