YMMV / Risk of Rain 2

Tropes with their own subpages:Game Breaker

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• Awesome Music: The music is incredibly evocative of the setting, taking a lot of what worked about the first game's OST and adding a sense of space to it. Some especially effective tracks include:
  • "A Glacier Eventually Farts (And Don't You Listen to the Song of Life)", the song used in the Void Fields. The OST version, linked here, includes a monologue from Werner Herzog discussing the rainforest, sampled from Burden of Dreams, a 1982 documentary about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo; the monologue isn't included in-game (apart from a faintly audible sample of birdsong), but somehow, it feels like Herzog could be describing the Void Fields. (The YouTube video description contains a link to the in-game audio.) Overall, after a few incredibly creepy minutes, the song builds to a beautiful climax that has to be heard to believed; it is an absolutely perfect soundtrack for the Void Fields.
  • "The Rain Formerly Known as Purple", the soundtrack to Sky Meadow. A fantastic tribute to Prince (and the title track of Purple Rain in particular) and a gorgeous piece of music in its own right.
  • "The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky", the ethereal, meditative music for Siren's Call and Bulwark's Ambry, feels almost spiritual.
  • "Petrichor V", the music for A Moment, Fractured, and a Moment, Whole, shares its name with the planet where most of the game takes place. "Petrichor", the earthy smell that occurs after rain, had been a Fan Nickname for the planet since the first game. Chris added the V in honour of Vangelis, whose soundtrack for Blade Runner is one of the major inspirations on this entire soundtrack (and the entire game, for that matter), but it is nowhere more apparent than on this track, which genuinely sounds like it could have been on the Blade Runner soundtrack. (V is also the Roman numeral for five, which is an Arc Number used in almost every song on Risk of Rain 2 soundtrack in some fashion.) In turn, Hopoo adopted this as the name of the planet.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • While most survivors generally prefer a particular set of stats from their items, Bustling Fungus is considered mandatory on Engineers as their turrets' inability to move means that the healing AOE is constantly in effect, massively increasing the survivability of the turrets, the Engineer, and any other players.
    • On the other side of the coin as of Survivors of the Void, Weeping Fungus is a vastly superior item for every other survivor in the game due to "sprinting for dear life" being a much more common and applicable scenario than turtling with 2-3 Engineer turrets or somehow finding a safe place to stand still without being pushed around. Its only downsides are that it corrupts any stacks of Bungus its owner already has and only heals its owner.
  • For many characters, Tri-Tip Daggers are one of the priority best items in the game, due to how bleed stacks damage and refreshes the duration, combining 10 daggers for a 100% chance to bleed on every attack is a best-case scenario that does overwhelming damage, especially for characters with fast attacks or a lot of attack speed.
    • On the other hand, if you're lucky enough to come across a Shatterspleen, it's very much worth converting your Tri-Tip Daggers into their Void form, Needletick, since by doing this, you're able to enact two different debuffs on monsters. The green item Death Mark deals bonus damage to any monsters that have four or more debuffs on them, and these two get you halfway there already.
  • Lens-Maker's Glasses are another must for most builds, since each pair of Glasses the player gets up to the tenth increases critical hit chances by 10%. A critical hit results in double damage, so getting ten pairs of glasses means the player will always do criticals. However, in practice, players may only need nine, because the items Harvester's Scythe and Predatory Instincts each give an unlisted +5% critical hit chance (but this bonus only occurs once for each item). Speaking of the Scythe, Glasses pair extremely well with it, since the Scythe heals the player significantly for each critical hit the player deals. Razorwire also works extremely well with this mix, since it deals damage to nearby enemies whenever the player is damaged. These can be critical hits. Nine Glasses, Predatory Instincts, and enough Scythes and Razorwire can lead to a point where taking damage frequently heals players.
    • The one character who arguably doesn't benefit from the Glasses-Scythe-Razorwire setup is Void Fiend, since they play havoc with his corruption (critical hits raise his corruption, while healing him lowers it; a player who wishes to use this setup with him will have to carefully manage item counts to keep his corruption in line). in his uncorrupted state, Void Fiend can use Suppress to heal whenever his corruption passes 25% (as long as he hasn't gotten too close 100% yet). He'll want to get Rejuvenation Rack and Aegis as quickly as possible (see the Game Breaker subpage); until he can do so, Cautious Slugs can further enhance his healing without playing havoc with his corruption, and Topaz Brooches will give him additional health for each kill he makes.
    • Meanwhile, this set of items is less essential (though still potentially helpful) for Captain, Loader, Bandit, and Railgunner; the Captain's Defensive Microbots provide him protection from many attacks, the Loader's Knuckleboom attack temporarily restores some of her health when she lands a hit, and the latter two have ways to do critical hits under some circumstances (and in fact, Glasses don't give Railgunner any additional critical hit chances; they just result in her doing more damage when she lands them).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Elder Lemurians are the bane of most high-level runs, because their damage output up close is so utterly absurd they can kill any survivor in less than a second even with one-shot protection involved, unless they're built for extreme tanking. They're slow, easy to see coming and only somewhat tanky, but even if you've got everything you could ask for and can obliterate them in seconds all it takes is one Elite spawning too close for comfort to go from zero to dead.
  • Those who bought the Survivors of the Void DLC on release had to deal with Void Infestors, little bugs that run around all over the place. On their own, they're not too dangerous, with only a single weak attack, but then there's their unique ability to infest other beings. Whatever they possess becomes extremely hostile to non-Void entities, gain a shield that blocks a single hit, and their attacks apply a stacking Collapse debuff that detonates when it expires to deal considerable damage (which makes enemies that rely on Death of a Thousand Cuts like Solus Probes a lot more dangerous). However, arguably the worst part of these little abominations is that during the DLC's initial launch, they were capable of possessing your own allies. It didn't matter if it's the littlest Gunner Drone, the TC-280 Prototype, the Engineer's turrets, or even Aurelionite, it's fair game for the Infestor. And as if having a powerful ally betray you wasn't enough, there was no way to release them from the Infestor's control, effectively making the ability a One-Hit Kill. It wasn't long until a patch reined the Infestors in, making it so they could not infest mechanical beings.
  • Also from Survivors of the Void are the Blind Pests. Imagine Wisps, but FAR deadlier and just as common. Their poisonous spit hits with an insane amount of accuracy and speed thanks to a busted hitbox making it hit farther than one might think. And thanks to being just as common as Wisps in some stages, a swarm of these guys means almost certain death for some players if they don't have the right loadout and items to take them out quickly.
    • Additionally, Blind Pests spawn in massive swarms without any obvious sound cue signaling their appearance, nor do they telegraph their attacks unlike the vast majority of the enemies in the game, making it very easy to get blindsided by them and killed before you can even retaliate. Their high firing error actually makes it harder to dodge them, since they have no obvious attack pattern to dodge. Furthermore, they can be found in massive numbers on one of the three starting stages, Siphoned Forest. But perhaps worst of all, they apparently have a much higher proc coefficient than Wisps do, making Elite Blind Pests extremely deadly, to the extent that (with the Artifact of Chaos enabled) three of them can take down a Magma Worm in mere seconds.
  • Perfected Lunar Chimeras, which only spawn on Commencement or during a Lunar Chimera family event, are vastly more dangerous than their default counterparts, gaining the effects of Transcendence, making it impossible to execute them with Old Guillotines, in addition to requiring you to focus them down lest you risk all your damage being undone. To add on to that they apply the Cripple debuff on hit, reducing your armor by 20 and reducing your movement speed by 50%, ensuring that if the enemy's initial barrage of damage doesn't do you in, their ability to fire 4 explosive projectiles that always do a flat 30% of your total HP will.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Gup. The large slime's simple yet adorable appearance took the fanbase by storm to the point that plenty of memes were made for them, and the Risk of Rain 2 Twitter account even promoted Gup for April Fools Day 2022 by making a New Survivor trailer for them!
• Even Better Sequel: Risk of Rain 2 takes the originally 2D sidescrolling mob-shooter, and transplants it into a three-dimensional space with a Co-Op Multiplayer that has greatly improved upon the original's, and is vastly easier to set up in comparison. To say that they managed to make it work, despite the massive shift from 2D to 3D, is an understatement. Even when the game was still in Early Access and with its fair share of bugs, it received a surge of players and an Overwhelmingly Positive reception on Steam.
• Goddamned Bats: Lesser Wisps are one of the weakest enemy types, but they have almost perfect accuracy and their attack hits almost instantly if they have a few seconds to charge it. If you're playing with Glass active, they can end a run pretty quickly.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Flying enemies tend to suffer issues with their momentum, with how the game calculates falling damage on enemies as "time spent in the air" means that if anything nudges them into a wall with enough force to trigger any fall damage at all, it will make them suffer enough damage to kill them several times over. This can make Elite Wisps, Greater Wisps and Elite Greater Wisps easier than they should be with characters who can cause knockback like MUL-T, Mercenary or the Loader. The latter two can even instantly kill Solus units or the Alloy Worship Unit by slamming it against a wall with their dashes because of how it transfer momentum.
  • The patch for the Survivors of the Void release accidentally made Rusted Key ungodly good because the Rusty Lockbox always dropped red items. Normally, it's a 20% chance. Not much else needs to be explained how broken this is. This was eventually fixed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Final Boss theme is called "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Ukulele". The Survivors of the Void DLC added the Polylute, a corrupted Ukulele that is, well, bigger than the normal one. Even funnier, the Polylute focuses on single-target damage instead of the multi-target lightning of the Ukulele, which makes it perfect for killing bosses.
• Jerkass Woobie: Mithrix, as revealed through Story Breadcrumbs. While Mithrix is unempathetic and callous towards mortal creatures, seeing them as nothing more than doomed vermin, he dearly loves his brother, Providence. When Providence grew worried about his brother's creations, he had Mithrix go in the Primordial Teleporter first before sabotaging it. Mithrix did not take this betrayal well, and undergoes Sanity Slippage both because he realizes he is trapped on the moon, and also because he resents how much Providence preferred the vermin over him. But despite his venom for his brother, Mithrix sometimes cries out for him while dying. He may have been a dangerous Mad Scientist who was brewing machines made for war, but at the end of it all, Mithrix only wanted to explore the cosmos with Providence, who he loved more than anything.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Among players, REX is probably the least popular of the survivors that have been added in so far. Its design and backstory is entertaining; however, in a game where you need to value your HP because you eventually reach the point where a few hits getting through will absolutely murder you, its Cast from Hit Points gameplay style gives it a level of risk that it doesn't do quite enough damage to compensate it for. While moderately more useful in multiplayer games because it can mortar at a range, in single player said playstyle, combined with a very poor speed and unimpressive basic attack, makes it a slog to play unless you get very lucky very early. The Hidden Realms update helped REX a great deal by swapping its right click to its alternate (from the single mortar shot to the rain of seeds) and made it free so only its ultimate takes HP to use, which combined with some overall much needed buffs on its damage done and health scaling has many people now calling it the best character in the game.
• Memetic Mutation: Speed is War. ^Explanation Two of the three Lunar Chimeras have this phrase as part of their journal entries, which are Mithrix's notes on their creation - he's very particular about making them fast. Since Mithrix himself is a Lightning Bruiser extraordinaire, clearly practicing what he preaches, the line's become a shorthand reference to his blistering speed and all the Survivors that died as victims to it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Voidtouched Elites, the result of a Void Infestor finding and possessing any non-player, non-mechanical entity. Voidtouched enemies gain a single stack of Safer Spaces, allowing them to tank any one hit every 15 seconds, forcing high damage survivors to break their shield before going for the kill, gain 50% more maximum HP, but deal 30% less damage... but they also gain a 100% chance to apply a stack of the Collapse status effect on hit, detailed below. If that wasn't bad enough Void Infestors serve as a stealth nerf to the Queen's Gland, Squid Polyp and Happiest Mask items as the allies spawned by these items can be corrupted and will VERY quickly kill their former masters.
  • The Collapse status from Voidtouched enemies. It's a status that does a heavy burst of damage after a few seconds, similar to the status applied from Overloading Elites. While it's pretty great against enemies, on the player, a few stacks of these is a guaranteed death sentence for unfortunate players, and if a Voidtouched enemy has a rapid rate of fire (the gatling gun clay men, for example), even a glancing blow can be fatal.
  • Upon their deaths, Void Reavers, Void Devastators, and Void Jailers have a nullifier implosion that instantly kills anything within a large radius within three seconds, including other Void Reavers, Void Devastators, and Void Jailers. This can be a double-edged sword, since a chain reaction of them can kill many of the player's foes, but it can also trap unsuspecting players, since these enemies may not always be visible. It is also inescapable unless the player reacts in time, though the Void Fiend's Trespass and the Heretic's Shadowfade temporarily delete the player's hitbox, rendering them immune for the duration of the abilities. (Note that the Lunar item Strides of Heresy will replace the player's normal Utility skill with Shadowfade, so any character can use it if they are willing to give up their Utility skill; also, the more Strides of Heresy the player stacks, the longer Shadowfade lasts. It also heals the player for its duration.)
• Scrappy Weapon: Bottled Chaos is near universally considered the worst item in the game. It functions by giving the player a random second Equipment effect whenever they use their current Equipment. The issue is that one of the random effects, the Volcanic Egg, turns the player into a flying fireball which can put players in danger unexpectedly since the fireball doesn't stop moving, has slow turning, and the player can still be damaged in this form. Aside from that, the item's random nature means that it can't be utilized reliably like other items, meaning its upsides are outweighed by its downsides.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Just like the first game, many of the unlockable artifacts make the game significantly more challenging with no real upside, meaning that this is the only reason a player would use those artifacts.
• That One Achievement:
  • Ethereal, added in the Skills 2.0 update, requires you to complete a Prismatic Trial as the Mercenary without falling below 100% health. Not quite a No-Damage Run since you can still take damage to your Barrier, but even if you find a Topaz Brooch within the first few seconds of starting the game, this is an absurdly difficult challenge. And since the Prismatic Trials are predetermined, if you don't get a good seed (i.e. a seed with a Topaz Brooch available very early on), you will need to wait 72 hours to get a new Prismatic Trial.
    • The other possibility is to simply wait until there's a seed with the Artifact of Glass enabled. Downside: You'll probably die if you take a single hit. Upside: If you took a hit, you'd fail the challenge anyway, and monsters die way faster. Also, if the second stage of the Trial is Sky Meadow (which can happen), you can simply leave through Bulwark's Ambry rather than clear the Time Crystals and teleporter event.
  • Piercing Wind requires the Huntress to complete Rallypoint Delta or the Scorched Acres without falling below 100% health. Even with the Artifact of Command to stack the deck in your favor, it requires multiple Topaz Brooches to even make it remotely possible, and all it takes is one Blind Pest or slightly-too-long fall to negate an attempt.
    • The Artifact of Kin and Artifact of Glass can make this significantly easier - Kin causes all monsters to be the same, so with the right rolls you can get all Beetles on the first levels; meanwhile, Glass causes your health to be reduced by 90%, but you also do five times the damage, so almost everything dies in one or two hits. (The reduced health is less of a concern for this challenge anyhow, since taking damage often causes the player to fail it.)
  • Bandit: Sadist sounds simple enough, but it's a pain to achieve for a number of reasons. To unlock it, you have to kill an enemy that has 20 stacks of Hemorrhage, which is applied by a critical hit from the skill Serrated Dagger. First, you have to be able to use the skill enough times to get that many stacks, which requires a fair number of cooldown or use-increasing items. You also need to be able to crit consistently, which is aided by backstabs having 100% crit chance but a lot easier with crit-chance items. Then you have to find an enemy that's beefy enough to survive being hit 20 (preferably more, so the stack doesn't wear off) times and the associated DoT. Then you have to hope nothing else in your arsenal kills it while you're trying to pull off the achievement. There's a reason it's below the 10% completion rate on Steam.
  • In comparison to all the other survivors, REX can be by far the biggest pain in the ass to unlock if the Random Number God is feeling particularly spiteful, as you need to carry the volatile Fuel Array equipment stored in your escape pod with you to Abyssal Depths, one of the environments that's selected as the fourth level you visit and use it to get REX back in working order. This means that dropping below 50% HP will instantly detonate it and kill you, which includes damage from shrines or containers that cost HP, locking you out of those in most cases). There's no guarantee Abyssal Depths will be the fourth level, though you can use a Newt Altar to access the Bazaar Beyond Time and force it to spawn. You also can't use MUL-T's ability to carry multiple pieces of equipment to keep the Fuel Array in an inactive slot, which would prevent the Fuel Array from blowing up as well as letting you carry an actually useful piece of equipment to make it easier for yourself, since the robot starts the game from inside a dropped crate that shatters on impact instead of a proper escape pod (though you can in multiplayer, as long as one other player doesn't pick him). Even the Artifact of Command won't help; the Fuel Array isn't part of the equipment rarity pool even though it takes up the slot, similar to other types of special items, so you can't simply wait to grab it from an equipment chest.
  • Bandit's B & E requires killing the final boss with Lights Out, and Captain's Smushed requires doing so with a supply beacon. See the final entry under That One Boss below, and then extrapolate the difficulty of killing him with a specific move - you have to make sure nothing else kills him first. As of this writing (May 2023), fewer players have Smushed (7.4%) than any other achievement.^note And not necessarily by a close margin, either - the second and third least completed achievements, 「V??oid Fiend』: Mastery (7.6%) and Railgunner: Mastery (8.3%), require owning the DLC, which many players still don't. The second least completed non-DLC achievement is Loader: The Thunderdome (8.6%), which requires killing three Loaders in Bulwark's Ambry.
• That One Attack:
  • The Wandering Vagrant has a new attack that it did not have in the first game: a powerful explosion with an extremely long range, massive damage, and a fairly short wind-up. It can be dodged just by putting cover between you and the Vagrant, but if you're playing as one of the slower characters, don't recognize the attack until it's too late, or just aren't close enough to cover, it is very likely that this attack will either kill you or put you close enough to death that another enemy will finish you off right after.
  • The Eye Beams of the Stone Titans have perfect tracking, do extreme damage if they can keep you in their sights, and can only be avoided by seeking cover. This is compounded by their ability to punch you into the air where there is no cover, and can be hell when multiples of them spawn at higher difficulties.
  • The Alloy Worship Unit has a ground-targeting attack that slows you down if you're near the impact area and throws you high in the air if you're hit, meaning you'll usually need to get out of the blast zone ASAP, which can even target you effectively if you're taking cover from its highly-damaging basic attack. You better hope you picked up items that increased your speed on any character without a means of moving around the map quickly, such as the Engineer. If you're anywhere below full health, it's also a One-Hit Kill, and will drop your health to the point where a slight breeze can kill your character if you get hit at that point (especially if you don't have a way to stop a lethal fall). As a final note, the boss will try using this a lot during the fight, keeping you constantly on your toes.
  • Clay Dunestriders, when they get close enough to death, siphon energy from anything foolish enough to be close to them, players and enemy monsters alike. Everything thus targeted is slowed down, and anything unable to get out will inevitably be crushed to death. Players who don't have ranged attacks or don't have a lot of movement options will be in for a world of hurt against this move. (However, a player with items that do a lot of damage to monsters in a small area, such as Gasoline, Will-o'-the-Wisp, or Ukulele, may be able to turn this move against the Dunestrider.)
  • The Void Reavers have their death implosion attack: when killed, a Void Reaver will trigger an implosion that will instantly kill every living thing in its radius, including the player. It also makes the bodies of those killed by it disappear, so if another Void Reaver got killed by the implosion, their own implosion will be completely invisible until it detonates, potentially ending a run because the player wasn't aware of its location until it was too late. They're hell for melee characters, who will die if they don't flee fast enough. The only characters who can (temporarily) become completely immune to it are the Void Fiend and the Heretic, who can respectively use Trespass and Shadowfade as panic measures when a Void implosion occurs; since these abilities delete their hitboxes, it can prevent them from being caught in the explosion long enough to wait out the danger and hopefully get away from potential sources of explosions. (As a general rule, no matter which character you're playing, if you're near a Void Seed and the screen starts turning to black and white, run away as fast as you can.)
  • The Grandparents' Solar Flare seems specifically designed to lure players into a sense of complacency. It might not seem that damaging at first, but it ramps up seemingly exponentially in severity, and by the time you realize you're in danger, it's too late. You can be doing completely fine against all other enemies on the level, but Solar Flare might still wipe you out.
• That One Boss:
  • Aurelionite, a tougher variant of the Stone Titans, can stand out as one since it possesses conditional invincibility on top of its incredible health pool, and the map is appears on has very little cover to speak of in its arena to avoid its undodgeable Eye Beams.
  • The Alloy Worship Unit is another. While not as deadly as Aurelionite, it takes much longer to kill. This is a huge problem because unlike Aurelionite the difficulty continues to increase while you are fighting the Unit, meaning that when you leave the area the enemies may have jumped several levels. This is especially fatal on Monsoon difficulty where the challenge increases much faster, and made even worse by the fact that you may accidentally summon The Alloy Worship Unit by destroying the nests with area of effect attacks or stray shots (ATG Missiles and Fireworks are especially guilty of this, as the nests are considered enemies). However, the Hidden Realms update made the Alloy Worship Unit (as well as the aforementioned Aurelionite) a lot more manageable, simply by nerfing how their HP and damage output scales at any given time on a run.
  • Unlike the first game where they just had attacks that mimicked some items the player could get, the Scavengers now accumulate new, random items as the fight goes on. This means that any Scavenger could potentially end up drawing a few items that make it nearly impossible to kill (such as a combination of Tougher Times, Gnarled Woodsprite, and Dio's Best Friend) or a combination of items that make it far more lethal than the developers likely intended (Royal Capacitor Scavengers are especially infamous for killing Survivors with barely even a glance).
  • The Overloading Worm, an electric variant of the basic Magma Worm, is an enemy that appears past Level 7 or so, and is infamous for being able to kill any well-equipped survivor in a heartbeat, no matter their items or build. Its health and damage far exceed anything else that can appear in the normal levels, it directly running into a survivor is a guaranteed kill (outside of Tougher Times interventions) and its lightning barrages are near impossible to dodge. Melee-centric survivors are at a marked disadvantage since they have to get near it to even hurt the Worm without ranged Equipment.
  • The Xi Construct added in Survivors of the Void is what you get when you combine the Wandering Vagrant and a Stone Titan. The Xi Construct's entire modus operandi is to fly into range and gun you down with its massive laser, which also has better tracking and does vastly more damage than the Titan's. Have "fun."
  • The Final Boss, Mithrix has a final phase that takes the absolute cake. At the beginning of the phase, he'll aim his hammer skywards and steal all of your items, taking their power for himself. Needless to say, depending on what or how many items you have, Mithrix can become incredibly powerful and capable of killing a whole team in a few seconds. Some survivors can't easily take their items back (those who rely on singular strikes like the Loader) without equipment that deals ranged damage (e.g., the Disposable Missile Launcher or the Royal Capacitor), exacerbating the issue. The only upside is that Mithrix is far less aggressive in this phase than in others, but this is of little comfort when your items often correct for that issue.
• Ugly Cute: Acrid's new design, being rendered in the softer cel-shaded art style, having an awkwardly large head and tiny lower body, and having its body in one piece instead of being bisected like its pixel art self in the first game, looks far less threatening and much cuter. A lot of the ways it wears items on its models are more amusing than Body Horror (like the Fresh Meat dangling out of the side of its mouth, or the Bandolier being worn like a necklace) and help this. In the first dev newsletter after its release, the devs referred to Acrid as a "strange wet dog" - so it seems even they think it is cute in its own weird way.

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