Risk Of Rain - Review

I only became aware of Risk Of Rain due to being signed up for alerts for a company called Limited Run.  Limited Run is a company that releases games in physical form but in a limited supply, once it's gone, it's gone.  I had originally signed up for alerts because of Saturday Morning RPG on the         PS Vita.  Unfortunately, I missed it & can now only find it on eBay for about $100, who knows maybe I will treat myself at some point.  When I saw Risk of Rain was going on sale I thought it looked like a cool 8-Bit Challenge & knowing that only two people created the game (Paul Morse & Duncan Drummond) made it intriguing.


I like M & M's, more specifically I love crispy M & M's.  When you start into a bag you think, 'yeah these are alright', then you eat more & think 'damn these are pretty good', before moving onto 'oh god no, the bag is empty, where have they all gone, I need more!'.  While playing Risk of Rain I had asked myself was this something that started out alright & just kept getting better or was it something far less satisfying.

The story is fairly simplistic, but that is not a bad thing.  You are on a transport ship passing over a planet, just chilling with your buddies, when out of nowhere a powerful, unknown enemy attacks & you end up being stranded on the planet below.  Your mission, get back on board the ship & stop the unknown enemy.


The more you play the game the more you learn about the enemies on it, simply playing the game through once will not get you all the answers.  If you kill so many of an enemy they will drop a 'monster log' (hehe), which gives you insight into them & provides you with more story.


Overall Risk Of Rain has an interesting if unoriginal story that helps provide you with another reason to play more of the game.

Visually the game is a cool 8-Bit style game with some interesting backgrounds, two of my favorite areas including Sky Meadows & Ancient Valley.  Sky Meadows uses a nice subtle purple as the main background colour which works really well with the contrasting bright moon.  Ancient Valley looked really cool, it featured snow, old pillars & what looked like a Stargate.  There are many unusual & interesting enemy designs, the most notable for me were; Ancient Wisp & the Colossus Bosses.


While visually it might not be the most amazing it is an 8-Bit Style game so high end graphics were never the aim.  It is also important to remember this game was created by only two people which is impressive in itself.


To say the music was good in the game is a little bit of an understatement. The sounds & styles used in the soundtrack are pretty diverse.  Listening to the soundtrack I could hear sounds such as; guitar riffs, 80's music, chill out music, it also had a very spacey sound to it - I know that may not make sense but if you listen to the score I think you will know what I mean.  I felt the sounds suited the tone of the game really well.


The composer for Risk of Rain was Chris Christodoulou who also worked on the games; Deadbolt (also created by Hopoo Games, Wanderlust Adventures & The Sea Will Claim Everything.  My favorite pieces of music from the score included;  'Aurora Borealis', 'Cyclogenesis', 'Tropic of Capricorn', 'Monsoon', 'Surface Tension', & 'Precipitation'.

So on to the gameplay! There are 3 difficulty settings; Drizzle, Rainstorm & Monsoon.  The description of each are funny, my favorite is for the 'Drizzle' difficulty - for players new to the game, weeping & gnashing is replaced by laughs & tickles.  Death is permanent in the game, which at times is a kick in the low & danglies but is part of the charm of the game.  Lucky enough though your health does regenerate overtime but if you are hoping to find a safe play to wait for this to happen then you are sadly mistaken.


With addition to your health regeneration there are many buffs you can collect as you go along, some offer faster health regeneration, while others help to make your attacks stronger.  These can be collected & bought as you are running around each area.


The objective in each level is to; find the teleporter, activate it, hold out for 90 seconds & after that whatever enemies remain you kill & escape to the next area.  The longer you play & survive the tougher the difficulty level gets, you start at very easy & go all the way up to hahaha.


There are many characters to chose from in the game that can be unlocked the more you play, my two favorite characters were the Bandit & Commando.


I only had two issues overall with the gameplay, the first was that it got very samey pretty quick, I also found the Co-Op mode to very meh & did not really make things any easier or beneficial.



So after playing for about 10 hours what did I think of Risk of Rain?  If I am honest, it was so, so. The music was good & some of the gameplay was interesting but I did lose interest in later playthroughs. That being said I think it is truly amazing that just two people managed to create this game & I am now very curious to play Deadbolt due to my experience with Risk of Rain.


I have been told by a few people over the last while it would make sense to have a more standard rating system, after some thought I agreed with what they said.  My overall score for Risk of Rain is 3 out of 5

Tales of the Borderlands - Review

I remember playing the original Borderlands when it first came out & I loved it, including all the  add-ons.  I played the game through multiples times solo & in co-op, naturally when Borderlands 2 was announced I was excited.  I felt gameplay wise it improved things over the original but the story, humor & characters were not as good.  I decided to try the add ons & liked some of them, then they started creating loads of mini add-ons which were not so great, I became bored of it & never went back to playing it.  When the Pre-Sequel was released I was fairly nonplussed about it & decide to give it a miss.  However when I heard Telltale Games was doing a game on Borderlands I thought to myself, hmmm this might be interesting. Unfortunately it got lost in the pile of many games I wanted to play until recently when I saw it on special on XBOX Game Store.


How do you feel about ready meals, more specifically Chicken Curry?  Well normally speaking it is passable as food, sates your hunger & tastes alright, it's good when you are in a bind or have no idea what else to eat.  On occasion though you have a really tasty chicken curry ready meal, so good you want more of it, with naan bread, onion bhaji's & some poppadoms. Playing Tale of the Borderlands I had ask myself was it a barely passable ready meal or some tasty meal that made me want more?

The game is introduced & narrated by everyone's favorite weapons dealer Maaarcuuus!  Bruce DeBose does his voice, there is something both comical & serious about it that works really well. The game has you take control of two characters.  There is Rhys (voiced by the talented Troy Baker), company man, snappy dresser & Fiona (voice by the equally talented Laura Bailey), con artist who has a kind of has steam punk look about her.  

Rhys has his best friend Vaughan (numbers man) & his other best friend Yvette (requisitions & lunch). The two are trying to help Rhys take control of Hyperion, unfortunately his nemesis, Vasquez (voiced by the hilarious Patrick Warburton) has other plans.

As with the Walking Dead & other Telltale Games the game is heavily story driven so I will need to spend a little time talking about it.  I have split it all up by the episodes & have given a little taste of what each of them are about while trying not to give away any spoilers.

Episode 1 - Zer0 Mission 

We are first introduced to Rhys & Fiona in flashback form, they have been kidnapped & their captor wants to know what brought them to this point. With the demise of Handsome Jack (Borderlands 2) there is a power vacuum building in the Hyperion company & one man in particular is looking to become top dog - Rhys.  Unfortunately this won't be happening anytime soon due to his nemesis Vasquez taking the promotion for himself.  Not prepared to take things laying down Rhys decides to head down to happy, safe Pandora to get himself some ol' fashioned revenge.  Turns out company men have no business being on Pandora as he & his friend Vaughn quickly discover.  Lucky enough they hobble together an alliance with two con artists; Fiona & her sister Sasha.  Episode 1 finishes off with; betrayal, loss, a ghost & a treasure map.

Episode 2 - Atlas Mugged

Episode 2 starts with more questions from Rhys & Fiona's captor, we get to see the story from both of their perspectives & try to work who is telling the truth.  It turns out sporks are handy not just for eating food, Rhys makes a frenemy & a treasure hunt begins.  Episode 2 has a very intense start; things go from bad to worse for Rhys & Vaughn, Fiona & Sasha aren't fairing much better.

Episode 3 - Catch A Ride 

The gang have just escaped from an Atlas facility, of course they think things can't get any worse, they are wrong. They discover Project Gortys which will help lead them to the treasure but only once it's fully completed.  Robot hi jinx ensue & the group is taken on a scavenger hunt, unfortunately for Vaughan he ends up having a shocking time.  The ending of episode 3 is unexpected & is by far the best episode so far.

Episode 4 - Escape Plan Bravo

The team are on the hunt for the final part of Project Gortys but it might be tougher than expected. It's time for a heist, as we all know every good heist needs, spaceships, high fives, skin pizza, travel sickness & cool slow motion walking.  Of course it's not that simple & we end up seeing the ultimate power of the Hyperion home base - Helios.

Episode 5 - The Vault of the Traveler 

Things are not looking good for Rhys & his frenemy is not too happy with him.  Sacrifices are made, Project Gortys is brought to the next level, many battles take place & we finally get to see if the gang will get their treasure.  We also discover who Rhys & Fiona's kidnapper is & why he captured you.  It is an action packed & drama filled conclusion.

If you have played any of the previous games in the series you will be used to the art style, which is continued in Tales from the Borderlands.  The character designs are interesting as always in Borderlands, Rhys was one of my favorite character designs,  he has a robotic arm, echo eye implant & a two face style outfit.  Some of the set pieces looks really good especially in the Jungle area in Episode 3 & the Road Trip montage in the same episode looked great.  The design used for the intros & credits looked really cool.

All in all the visuals are exactly what I have got used in the Borderlands series, no more, no less.  As the saying goes, if it ain't broken why fix it?

The music has many sides to it, sometimes it is subtle, sometimes  it intense & other times it has a high octane action sound. Listening to the soundtrack again I can definitely here elements of the Walking Dead.  There are some people who suggested it has a Firefly-esqe sound & I would have to agree but maybe that's because it feels like you are a bit of a space cowboy in the game.  There are number of artists that makes up the sound in Tales of the Borderlands, they include:

Jared Emerson-Johnson; who was the composer for Telltales The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us & Sam & Max Season 1.

Additionally there were a number of artists who's songs made up the soundtrack, they include;  Twin Shadow, Shawn Lee, Nino Moshella, Jungle, James Blake, The Rapture, Wilco, Halsey, The Weeknd, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Ray, Sara Jackson-Holman.

There are many great pieces of music in the game, some of my favorites include; 'Boot Game', 'Caves', 'Dam Top',  'Purple Skag', 'Run Through the Desert', 'Lynchwood Sheriff', 'Jungle Chase'

'Tundra Express'.  There were a number of songs that stood out for me; 'To The Top' by Twin Shadow,

'Kiss the Sky' by Shawn Lee & Nino Moshella,  'Busy Earin' by Jungle,  'Piece of the People We Love' by The Rapture.  Overall a solid soundtrack with some interesting pieces of music.

Onto the meat, gameplay!  Traditionally in Telltale games the action or quick time events are sporadic,  the gameplay itself focuses on picking responses to what is being spoken about.  In Tales of the Borderlands there is significantly more action sequences which makes things both different & really fun.  

One of the features I really liked was Rhys's echo eye which is used to obtain more information on the world around you, more often than not the information give is really funny.  One thing that seemed a little pointless was the inventory as it was not like you had a choice in what you could use. Also Fiona collecting money felt unneeded as what you could buy was not that good & did not really make the gameplay anymore enjoyable.

While I enjoyed the latest series of the Walking Dead I felt that Javier & Clementine did not get equal screen time where as with Rhys & Fiona I did not find this to be the case.  I enjoyed the dynamic between the characters & it was interesting trying to work out what the real truth was.  For me part of the appeal of Borderlands is the dark humor which has been a staple in the series. As with the other games it can be; gross, graphic, foul mouthed, intense, crazy & very funny.

There were two really stand out moments when playing; the first was the gun fight in episode 4, which I have to say hands down is one of my favorite shootouts ever, the second was the end boss fight which was not only fun but also felt a bit like Power Rangers.

There was some interesting gameplay that by & large worked well,  it is something I would be interested to see used more in future Telltale Games.

So after 12 plus hours what did I think of my experience in Pandora?  Honestly pretty good, I had a few issues when it came to story as I felt occasionally the pacing was off & a few gameplay elements felt a little unneeded but as a whole I really enjoyed it.  I would be mildly curious to see if any of the story from Tales of the Borderlands will show up in Borderlands 3.   Overall I give this game a monkey thumbs up!