Crash landing on a mysterious planet, you are immediately dropped into the battlefield. Beginning as the commando you can shoot, dodge roll, stun, and knockback your enemies. Which you will have to learn quickly because waves and waves of enemies spawn as you work your way through each procedurally generated level. As you defeat them you gain XP to level up your health and damage, andCrash landing on a mysterious planet, you are immediately dropped into the battlefield. Beginning as the commando you can shoot, dodge roll, stun, and knockback your enemies. Which you will have to learn quickly because waves and waves of enemies spawn as you work your way through each procedurally generated level. As you defeat them you gain XP to level up your health and damage, and collect coins to purchase upgrades.
Upgrades can range from a drone that joins you in battle, to gaining small amounts of health with each kill, or setting the ground on fire with every enemy death. So depending on your pickups after a few rounds of battle you can be quite the formidable foe. At the end of your run your screen will be decorated with tons of pickups that you have gathered along the way.
However, as your play time raises so does the games difficulty. So if you can make it to the first level’s boss quickly it will be a much easier battle, but if you take your time methodically killing enemies and leveling up your character, the boss fight will really put you to the test. While it’s an interesting mechanic, it can be very stressful, causing you to jump into shootouts a lot faster than you would prefer. Which will happen a lot because you will be overwhelmed with enemies as the timer climbs, which will inevitably lead to tons of brutally devastating deaths, and being a rogue-like you start over from square one with all of your upgrades taken away.
As you complete different in game objectives you unlock different characters to play as, which REALLY changes the gameplay experience. Each character’s unique skill sets can range from engineers with ballistic missile barrages and grenade launchers to the Acrid a monster melee specialist with toxic slime trails. Playing through these different characters and learning their unique abilities is tons of fun, and adds immensely to the replayability. With the retro pixel style the characters are very well designed and animated, with subtle touches to add personality to each individual, the bandits hat bouncing up and down as he walks truly makes him feel alive.
The platforming in Risk of Rain doesn’t feel as responsive as modern indie titles and the level design gets old very fast. Despite artistic changes the mechanics per level don’t vary enough to change the way that you play the game. The same goes for boss fights as their procedurally generated also... you can fight the same boss level after level, which can be incredibly tedious.
Risk of Rain runs great in both docked and handheld mode, and after playing this game originally on the vita, it’s a nice change to play on the Switch’s larger screen.
Risk of Rain is an addictive platformer roguelike with rewarding progression per run and great character classes to unlock and learn. However, the simplistic platforming feel as well as repetitive level and bosses keep this good platformer from being a great one.… Expand
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