Risk of Rain 2

This game just did not stick with me. I found it to be one of the most boring and uninteresting roguelikes I've ever played. First the positives: The music was alright, not amazing but ok. The survivor designs are pretty neat, the overall aesthetic is.. neat and I'd say Solus Wing was my favourite boss. That's about everything I liked. Now for the problems. The time-based difficulty scaling is one of the most annoying mechanics I've ever seen. It constantly feels like you're rushing because if you spend too long exploring, suddenly every enemy starts taking forever to kill while every hit deletes half your health. A lot of the survivors are also just annoying to play, especially the melee ones. Getting close to bosses is incredibly risky and some fights feel like they were never designed with melee characters in mind. The items are boring as hell, most of them are just stat increases or status effects that really aren't super fun to play around with and by the late game seemingly you're just meant to obliterate everything as quickly as possible because a stray drop of piss will kill you which is super good game design :) Another thing that really annoyed me was the damage. You don't slowly lose health over the course of a run, you're either completely fine or you instantly explode because one random attack decided to erase your health bar and it makes deaths feel really cheap. Most enemies also just shoot projectiles at you which I found way more annoying than the enemy design in the first game. Teleporter events become a chore because enemies keep spawning all around you while firing from every direction. The stages are also really bland. They don't feel like actual places and more like a static plane with chests and shrines slapped onto them The final boss also sucks. Depending on your build he either dies in two minutes or 20, and if you're playing a melee survivor the fight becomes even more miserable. I'm also really not a fan of how the game looks. Compared to the clean pixel art of the 2D games, everything here has this weird glossy, blobby look that I just don't like. Even the item models are inconsistent. Looking through the logbook you'll notice things like the Crowbar being absolutely massive for no reason, and a lot of the textures are really pixelated. Finally, the DLCs are pretty overpriced for what they add. I just don't think there's anywhere near enough content in them to justify the price. Overall this game was a chore to finish, the original version might have been worse on a technical level, but at least it was 3 times shorter. I give this game a 3/10, what a perfect ending to this mediocre franchise