Risk of Rain. January 20, 2014
You're on a freight ship laden with tons of cargo ranging from incredibly valuable to not-so-much, flying through the solar system when tragedy strikes. A freak explosion in one of the numerous cargo compartments sends the ship spiraling out of interstellar space, hurtling toward an uncharted and unexplored planet. Your escape pod crashes to the surface of the inhospitable planet and emerge, relatively unscathed. Just as you can gather your wits and most basic equipment, it becomes all to clear you are not wanted on this planet.
Risk of Rain is a 2D, side scrolling action game. Set on an unusual planet of mystery, you play as one of ten survivors from the crashed ship. You must traverse through several levels of the game, gathering equipment, defending yourself against the (literally) endless waves of enemies determined to stain this alien world with your blood, and, most importantly of all, leaning to master each of the four unique abilities of your class. Risk of Rain, like many Rogue-like or Rogue-lite games of its kind, on your initially attempt, starts you off on an incredibly watered down version of the game; you can only select one of the ten classes and only a handful of items are initially unlockable. However, as you progress through the game, completing various feats, you unlock a wide range of equipment that can be found randomly throughout the levels, or unlocking the rest of the classes.
Advancing through the game numerous times is made less repetitive with the pseudo-randomly generated levels. Each tier of the first four levels have a small pool (two or three per level tier) of areas from which the game picks your destination. In each of these areas, a multitude of different terrain features can be altered through each play through and the location, type, acquisition of the numerous pick-ups varies with each game. The combination of these three randomized elements leads to games that have a strong potential to very different from game to game.
Each of the classes in the game adds another degree of replayability to Risk or Rain. Each character has a potent set of four active, surprisingly varied, abilities to help each class on his or her journey to escape the hostile planet. Play styles range from the almost tower-defense-like engineer, the jack-of-all-trades commando, the slow but incredibly sturdy enforcer, and powerful but limited sniper, just to name a few. As the difficulty of the game increases and more and stronger enemies come at you, the strengths and weaknesses of each class must be respectively utilized and avoided to progress through the game (the enforcers combat shield does nothing against enemies behind him, the sniper is well suited to long-range engagements, etc.).
Additionally, likely one of the most unique aspects of Risk of Rain is its difficulty mechanic: the longer you spend in the game, the harder things get. This raises an interesting dilemma on how to play the game: do you rush through each level, fighting weaker monsters with a weaker character, or do you hunt through every nook and cranny, trying to discover all the items in the level, but desperately rely on those items in the heat of battle? Often if you don't play wisely or just get unlucky (a high probability in almost any Rogue-like game), you'll find yourself falling further and further behind the curve as your battles take longer and longer to win, soon leaving you swarmed by over-powered enemies that your equipment (or lack there of) leaves you almost helpless against.
Finally, Risk or Rain allows for up to 4-player cooperative games. The intimidation of being stranded on a alien planet with numerous hostile creatures in greatly lessened by playing with friends, but each friend who joins also makes the resources more scarce. While the same number of experience, money, and items are found in the game, only one person can get each piece of equipment found, and money and experience is not shared equally. This means that a poorly organized game can quickly lead to disaster. However, the opposite is true: a team who works together, combines their skills creatively, and distributes the wealth wisely can easily surpass waves of foes that would have crushed a single lone player.
While Risk of Rain can be quite infuriating at times due to getting poor equipment or a lack of other resources, I keep going back to the game. While I can't say the game is ALWAYS fun, it is ALWAYS challenging. Risky moves are occasionally rewarded if fortune smiles upon you, and yet other times an almost certain probability will almost never seem to occur. Risk of Rain wears its mantel of "Rogue-Like" proudly; I have never felt as though the game has cheated me when I've died, and the game is one of the most rock-hard games I've played in quite some time. I love this game because when you fail, you fail hard, but when you succeed, you feel like you've gone against impossible odds and still managed to come out on top.