Risk of Rain Returns Review

If there’s one genre that lends itself to boom or bust, it's the online shooter. For every success like Call of Duty, Halo, or Apex Legends, it seems like there are at least a dozen other games that have come and gone with barely a spark before they fizzle. With so many good competitive shooters in play, what makes one stand out? What makes it worth diverting your time to in versus another? After my first night of matches in The Finals, I think I’m starting to get a picture for how it answers those questions.

The Last of Us 2 Remastered's new roguelike mode is inspired by a "renaissance of roguelikes."

Rainbow Six Siege fans did a collective double take last week when Activision shared the next slate of operators coming to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone. Meet Dokkaebi: a «skilled spy and robotics engineer» available in the Season 1 battle pass. Call of Duty's Dokkaebi immediately drew comparisons to popular Siege operator Dokkaebi: a skilled hacker who disrupts and steals enemy intel.

GSC Game World has shared the latest trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and the return of a beloved character: Strider.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is drawing ever nearer, and at today’s PC Gaming Show, GSC Game World delivered a new story trailer for the game. The big news, is that the trailer features none other than Strider, a key character from the previous entry in the series, STALKER: Call of Pripyat. We also get a variety of other hints that this isn’t a narrative reboot – this game will be carrying on the story from past games, so make sure your STALKER lore is in order before you jump in. You can check out the new STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl story trailer, below.

Equipment is the utility option that further aids your character besides the main skills and some of the best offensive and defensive items in Risk of Rain Returns. You can always carry one equipment at a time, and it can be manually activated, just like skills in the game.

Not many games have a story like Indika, a game about a 19th century Russian Orthodox nun journeying to the centre of her soul with an «unusual, horn-headed companion.» Drawing inspiration from Dostoevsky and Bulgakov and dripping with dark humour, Indika tells a tale of religion and authority, madness and belief. But also, not many games have a story like Indika, whose developer Odd Meter left Russia when the country invaded Ukraine in February last year. Calling the invasion an «insane crime» perpetrated to «satisfy the ambitions of an elderly, weak-minded dwarf,» game director and studio founder Dmitry Svetlow decided to up and move Indika's development—and the company behind it—out of Moscow to neighbouring Kazakhstan, even moving the «entire recording studio by truck.» And both of those stories make it, for me, one of the most fascinating games to grace this year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted.

For the Czechoslovak Legion in Last Train Home, the difficulties they face are very different from realising you’re not going to catch the 00:40 from London Victoria to Bromley and need to face up to an expensive as heck cab ride back. Instead, they face an almost impossible mission simply to survive, having to go thousands of miles away from their newly independent home of Czechoslovakia, charting passage between two sides of a cruel civil war on the way from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Surviving in Risk of Rain Returns becomes impossible as difficulty scales and stronger enemy types and bosses start to appear and hunt you down. You will need to equip some of the best offensive items in the game to keep clearing stages and continue looping. Weaker items will only weigh you down and get you killed in the long run.

Defeating bosses, looping stages, and acquiring powerful items or the stacks of existing ones are the core gameplay elements in Risk of Rain Returns. Having the best defensive items bolsters your chances of surviving anything the game throws at you, and without these, any build is prone to fail, and your character will die as difficulty spikes.

Survivors are the core gameplay value in Risk of Rain Returns, as each of these 14 characters comes with unique skills offering versatile builds and playstyles. At the same time, you start with two characters, Hunter and Commando; the rest of the roster needs to be unlocked.

Risk of Rain Returns features secret survivors and stages that require players to go the extra mile to unlock them. While each stage in the game houses secrets, items, and Artifacts for the players to find, locating Boar Beach is pure luck.