TL;DR - I love this game, and I can't recommend it enough. If you like 3rd person hero shooters or roguelikes with interacting items, you'll love this.


I've played a good number of roguelikes in my days, and Risk of Rain 2 has just one issue that a lot of them share: You can play for hours and have your run end in a matter of seconds, wasting all that time.

Now, for some this potential loss of time is raising the stakes, I know I for sure felt that at the start. However, now that I'm hundreds of hours deep, I realize that a large portion of my time with this game left me feeling unfulfilled despite having a ton of fun just prior. I burnt out on Binding of Isaac for the same reason, you can be having the best time of your life but find yourself on the death screen without even realizing what happened.

However, mods have saved the day for me and this game.


In this game, I separate my time between unlocking everything vs. completing everything. At a certain point, the game will stop giving you "new" content, which is fine! All games have to end somewhere, but much like competitive Pokemon or ranked game modes in online shooters, there's harder, more in-depth offerings for you if you seek them out.

Let's start with that first phase, the "unlocking everything" part of the game. In this, you'll be working your way up the difficulty modes (From "Drizzle" to "Monsoon"), and unlocking new abilities and items for you to use in future runs. This is the part of the game I think the majority of players will truly enjoy, even without mods. The game thrives in this state, where even after a death you have new content to try out and look forward to on your next run. You won't be as good at the game, so you'll be dying much quicker, and victories are fewer and further between, making each run where you beat a boss feel like an incredible achievement. It's awesome.

However, once you've dried that well and moved onto the "completing everything" side of the game, things start to crumble a tiny bit. As you look for more Risk of Rain 2 content to enjoy, because you have all this game knowledge and experience that you want to use, you begin to notice this "Eclipse" mode. This game mode requires you to beat the boss of the game with a character, each time increasing the difficulty by adding a modifier to the game. With each run taking upwards of an hour and a half if you're taking your time, maybe just under an hour if you're rushing, this is anywhere from 8-12 hours per character, assuming you win on your first time, which you won't. Each "Eclipse level" makes the game harder, and arguably slower too, and it's at this point where I stopped enjoying the game as much as i had when I first played it.

However, the mods saved it.


I thought the game was perfect in that "unlocking everything" part. And it is! The completing everything phase however needed some extra work. Here's a list of problems that mods saved, from least to most important:

• The intro cutscene to the game plays every time you open it.
  
• Interactable objects (called Shrines, 3D Printers, and Scrappers) are wildly slow and tedious to use, and typically play long animations that drag on in the fast-paced nature of the game.
  
• Certain items have situational limitations that seem like missed opportunities, frequently rendering the item useless (such as the rare "Regenerating Scrap" item only being able to be used on rare items, and not also common items)
  
• Some builds are so common, easy to assemble, and effective, they become go-to strategies, and are so character-agnostic that they always work no matter who you're playing. (This isn't a bad thing, just something I've noticed in my 400+ hours)
  
• Level bosses can be killed in seconds, however the boss event timer continues to drag on.
  
• No saving. At all. You cannot close the game mid-run.

Mods fix all these problems, and are incredibly easy to install using the R2modman mod manager. No intro, Faster interactables and less downtime in general, buffs and nerfs to items, and SAVING THE GAME of all things. Mods have saved my interest in this game, as all the things I thought were good design choices at the start are annoyances now that I've improved at the game.

However, there is one mod that I use that would cause controversy. It's a mod for a mod. See, the mod that adds saving (called ProperSave) follows the spirit of the game. It'll save at the beginning of a level, and will delete itself if you die, so the experience is still the same as the base game. There is a mod that removes that functionality (called ProperSave_NoDeathDelete) and makes it so you can restart a level if you die, keeping all the progress you've made in a run up to that point. I know it's against the concept of a roguelike, but having played this game for so long, I find that I'll be on an amazing run, maybe not even the most effective, but it's just fun, and I'll die from an off-screen enemy because I'm listening to music instead of the games soundtrack (which is excellent, for the record). Being able to just... try the level again is still enough time penalty to make deaths meaningful but keeps the flow of the game going and doesn't squash the fun I was having.

So yeah. Mod this game. The devs made a fantastic game for the first half, and the modders have saved the second.


Overall this game is fantastic, even with all it's minor shortcomings. Making it mod-friendly has only cemented it up there with Bethesda game-levels of modding fun. There's so much to love about this game that any complaints I have are usually just that I want more of it, which is never a bad thing. Fantastic game.