Console friends, today is a day that you should mark as being appropriate for celebration as you spend far too much time playing video games: Risk Of Rain 2 has finally released on console platforms, over two months after the original 1.0 release of the title hit Steam on August 11.
Better late than never; prepare to lose hours of your life building the wildest builds of your life that have an esoteric piece of equipment as a fulcrum to your build before it somehow gets sent to a grinder and leaves you helpless to a screen filled with enemies.
It’s a brutal time, but simultaneously a heck of a lot of fun.
The patch arrived five hours ago to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch, bringing with it an ‘official’ end to the game via an obscenely difficult boss, a new introductory cutscene that you’ll be desperate to skip every time you boot, and a new survivor by the name of Captain.
If you’ve been tracking the PC-side of Risk of Rain 2 development, you’re likely already understanding what this is bringing: a bit more content, a wealth of tweaks and balances, and a heck of a lot of in-game lore to stumble across.
The greatest mechanical change that is introduced is the bleed effect, which now refreshes whenever a new bleed is applied to enemies or the player: if you have three stacks of bleed applied to an enemy that is about to run out (thus dropping a stack), when you apply a new stack the timer refreshes.
This is critical information; if you see that an enemy is applying bleed to you, you’ll need to focus that one down before you waste away while scratching your head about where your HP is going.
Aside from the content and fixes (and the all-important bleed rework), it’s still Risk of Rain 2 as you understand it and have played in the past: a run could take well over an hour, or a poor loot layout could end it in as soon as five minutes.
In between that time span is where the title will either make or break you.
Once you finally are able to chew through the meaty content that the title already has, take heart; the developers over at Hopoo Games have stated that they’re more than prepared to continue work and development on the title for the foreseeable future, guaranteeing a whole lot more pod drops.
