Review - Risk of Rain - PC

                    

Risk of Rain - Roguelike Action Platformer

What is it?

In the simplest terms Risk of Rain is an action platformer with roguelike qualities. You choose your character, your difficulty and then you’re off, thrown into a world where the inhabitants want to murderize you and anything that aids in your survival costs you money which can be acquired from the local murderers.
As with most games of this nature you only get one shot at completion and while there is some skill involved in surviving, by utilizing your characters abilities to the fullest, it’s mostly just a huge amount of luck though it’s definitely not enough to deter you.

Gameplay

 The game features 10 characters, 9 of which you will have to unlock by completing various tasks such as completing the game or killing a certain boss. Each character has a unique combat style which you will have to get used to in order to stand a chance at making it to the final boss, the one you’ll most likely spend a lot of time with is the commando a.k.a the guy you start with so get used to rolling out of danger and making use of those brief invincibility frames.

Controls in a game like this are a large factor in determining how good the game is, piss poor controls - piss poor platforming. Luckily Risk of Rains controls don’t hamper your ability to perform, the keyboard control s are very responsive and have a layout that won’t leave you with T-Rex hands (all small and in pain). If you’re not a fan of using keyboards for this sort of game (and I can’t really blame you) then you’ll be happy to hear that you can grab your nearest 360 pad and use that instead and while I haven’t tried it for myself I can’t imagine this method causes any problems.

Through each level you’ll be earning XP and gold from murdering the locals, this gold can then be used on the various chests, monster spawners, shrines and lucky dip machines scattered throughout each level. The game has a crazy amount of items in it all of which will benefit you and your survival in some way. Items come in two forms, the first are passives which you can just collect dozens of and end up a walking tank that fires rockets out of its arse and sets things on fire with lazer eyes.

The second are usable items which you can only carry one of at a time, these are typically more situational items like a skeleton key to open all chests on screen or a huge saw blade that goes across the screen decapitating things. The amount of variation in the items means that no two playthroughs are alike and you find yourself hoping for that one amazing thing you found last time only to end up with something new and exciting. As if all of the items you find aren’t enough you can also spend your gold to repair various drones that have broken down, these will fly around you and assist in your murdering/survival. A word of warning however, they can be broken by enemies and will get exponentially more expensive to fix.

Graphics

Risk of Rain has a great pixel art style going on that seems to be quite popular of late. It doesn’t make the game feel cheap or like a cop-out in any way though it actually enhances it, having such a simplistic art style in a roguelike platformer means you’re not going to get distracted by “ooh shiny background stuff” and die and be all sad and mopey because you were so close but actually not really that close. Each level represents a different biome and they all look great, you’ve got everything from snow to fungal caves and magma. The enemy design is also a strong feature, bosses look great and really stand out above the swarms of other monsters you’ll be dealing with.

Audio

The sound track is fantastic. It manages to be subtle and unobtrusive yet incredibly well composed and varied. The level themes lull you into a nice calm and relaxed state and then the boss themes send the chills right back down your spine. The soundtrack was composed by Chris Christodoulou and you can find it and other works by him at his bandcamp page HERE

Music is only half the battle with audio, the other half and arguably the more important part is the sound design. There’s no doubting that the sound design is great here, the gun shots are varied and visceral (especially when you crit). The sound design has an old school feel to it with things like fire effects reminding you of Mega Drive era explosions, I’m pretty sure there was ample use of Bit-Crushers when it came to the audio in order to achieve some of that rough edge to the sound. Enemies each have their own call if you will as do bosses, though one boss in particular has possibly the greatest and most horrific pig squeal sound effect, I really can’t decide if I like that or not, maybe it’s because it nearly deafened me when it first happened.

Story

Not so much to say with this one, the general gist of it is that you crash land and use a bunch of teleporters to go to a different ship and fly away. Ignoring the planetary genocide you commit through the game there isn’t a whole lot of story. This may not be a huge problem for a lot of people (myself included) but I know there are those of you out there who want to know more and want the lore etc so that’s probably a negative for you. But I have to say that if you’re put off by a lack of story in a game like this then you’re crazy.

Yay or Nay?

There’s no way it’s not a huge YAY for this title, I picked it up for about £6 and there are hundreds of hours of play I’m sure. Between finding all the characters, unlocking all the items, getting through the harder difficulties and setting personal records there’s a metric tonne of things that will keep you coming back for hours upon hours. This game is great in pretty much every way, if you’re somebody who loves games like Binding of Isaac because you can do 1 or 2 deaths and move on to other things then definitely pick this up. Also did I mention it has online multi-player? Yea, imagine all this, with your friends! MADNESS AND CHAOS ENSUES.