Recent reviews by Ricken

From the alpha this game has lost a few things, namely the leveling system and the skill tree, however there was a lot more that had been shown by the developer on his twitter that was being worked on and added to the game, most of that content is absent.


Currently the only real "progression" is getting new higher grade equipment (weapons and armor and such) which can take anywhere from a few hours to maybe 30 minutes if you get lucky and have a random treasure drop you a gold weapon which then trivializes the rest of the zone letting you one shot just about everything, and getting artifacts which are severely underwhelming right now simply because most of them are just +1s to travel or utility things such as "+1 hang glider speed" or "+1 light radius" mostly irrelevant buffs or changes. There are anywhere from 1 to 5 artifacts per zone and upon leaving a zone your weapons and armor becomes ineffective and useless unless its special + gear which i still haven't found, along with all of your gear becoming useless when you enter a new zone you lose all special artifacts such as your ability to ride your mount, hang glide, or ride your boat.

Personally I can't recommend this game to anyone even when playing it with friends it still retains the same gameplay loop of get gear get artifact reset progress, the time that this whole loop can take varies wildly in my experience, the exploration aspect of the game is, in my opinion, almost completely pointless since the entire map is revealed to you from the start removing any need to explore along with that there is little variation between quest encounters in the zones I've explored most of the different zones honestly just feel like reskins of the first one i started in without much changing between them, there is no grand goal to work towards no special reward waiting at the end just a hollow world filled with repeating encounters and pointless gear. The game feels like its gone through a severe loss of identity from the alpha like the developers no longer know what they want the game to be.

TL DR: The game is missing many features that were shown to be working or in progress and over the past six years of development it only really feels like things have been removed, the gameplay loop is very simple and wildly varies in time required as well as almost completely resetting any progress you make the instant you move to a new zone in the world, the only things that persist between zones are so minor and pointless it doesn't feel rewarding in the slightest. Wouldn't recommend this game even if you have friends to play it with honestly.

I absolutely loved the first risk of rain and this game is just as fantastic, great addictive gameplay thats even harder than it was in the first and I can't wait to see how the game changes and evolves with updates! Seriously worth the money especially if you have friends to play it with!

Personally I am loving this game right now, I'm having some serious problems with it though, at least right now. First off there are quite a few bugs even though its supposed to be fully released, some are awful and force you to log out or restart your game others are managable and just look strange.

Second, the progression feels extremely slow, and could possibly be sped up by giving the players a better means of transportation earlier on, what I mean by this is that there is not reliably fast way of getting from point A to B until about level 25, my current playtime is about how long it took me to get that vehicle that allows me to get from point A to point B reasonably quickly and as I am writing this review I still don't have the vehicle because it has a two hour crafting time, not to mention the rather annoying to aquire parts that are required to craft this vehicle. Travel time is a lot of this game and without something to make it go by faster travel time eats up a lot of your time playing and can bore a lot of people.

One rather good qualities of this game are the classes and how many of them there are and how interesting some of them are, take the armory for example, it is a class based completely around your skills giving you different weapons that can do different things, the one major downside to having all these classes is that not all of them are given to you right away, you start with four classes, the Biotech (Kind of like a healer) the Engineer (places turrets and other machines to assist it's team) the Assault (heavy damage output and uses a grenade launcher of sorts) and the Dreadnaught (heavy weapons guy he has a big gun and a lot of health basically a tank) by getting any of these battleframes to level 40 (max level) you will be given 10 pilot token and be able to unlock a second class, however if you really don't want to level one of those to max level you can save your crystite and buy the class off of the auction house (it will cost a LOT of crystite) OR you could pay money to get one of the classes. I like and dislike this sytem. I like it because it gives you multiple ways of unlocking something, two of which are obviously faster than the one, it gives you options which is always a good thing in an MMO. The reason I don't like this system is because farming the crystite to get the battleframe off of the auction house can be extremely boring and repetative, not to mention the battleframe you want might not even be on there, and obviously I would want to avoid spending real money especially considering it is rather expensive to buy another battleframe.

Another very nice thing about the game is it's visual style and graphics (although these can cause problems for people with lower end rigs) a lot of the environments are very pleasing to look at and normally you don't mind being in an area for too long because of how nice it looks. There is also the matter of gameplay, during the game you can change your perspective to be in either first or third person something I personally see as a plus as it allows players to feel more comfortable while they are playing. Along with the ability to change perspective the overall gameplay feels very solid and works well most of the time. I say most of the time and not all of the time because sometimes the enemy AI just derps out and will sit there staring at a wall while you shoot the crap out of them.

I know I have said a lot of negative things about this game but I really do love this game and I find that the more I see to acomplish and the more I learn about the story and the various characters you interract with while playing the game the more interested I become and the more I want to learn, which is actually very unsual for me because normally I completely ignore the story in an MMO and just focus on playing the game and acomplishing goals I set for myself.

IF YOU ARE TOO LAZY TO READ ANY OF THIS THEN THIS LAST BIT IS ALL YOU SHOULD WANT TO READ

Overall I do really enjoy the game, it has some bugs and is very much not a perfect game, however I do enjoy it greatly, the environments and graphics are nice it has a fair ammount of surprisingly interesting side stories and missions to do. Along with that is has very nice classes and gameplay although there are some issues with progression and aquiring new battleframes. I would highly recommend this game and have recommended it to quite a few people. However do not expect this game to be perfect especially if you have a lower end PC or lower end internet, also don't be put off by the immidiate push for microtransactions, a lot of the things in there can be aquired through the exchange of crystite for other currencies and through the auction house. I hope I covered enough to at least convince some people to give this game a shot and I do hope to see more people playing this game in the future.