I have been playing Risk of Rain 2 more consistently over the last year than any other game. It’s become one of my favourite time wasters, one of my favourite roguelikes, and now that the rough edges have been patched out on console, there’s nothing stopping me from calling it one of my favourite games full stop. Survivors of the Void just gives it more volume. New items, new maps, new enemies, new secrets, and all these crazy new synergies that let you break the game even further and do exponentially more wild and crazy things than before, which is saying something. Give me a couple Safer Spaces and some Plasma Shrimp that’s it, that’s practically a free win.

I’m probably going to be playing this game for as long as I own a platform that runs it.

Keep in mind that this is pretty centrally based on Monsoon, because it's about 90% of my playtime:

Initially I really did like this, but I think that's partially just because when they increase the item pool and add as much content as they did, surface level it reflects quite well. But this is absolutely plagued by some moronic 'more is better' design logic. Just the barebones inclusion of collapse is befuddling - a debuff, that can stack, that does a lump sum of damage to you at once. Maybe not initially a problem but you play 4 person Monsoon difficulty and you can instantly get killed by any enemy without realising you were in trouble at all.

The new characters both don't feel fantastic to play. It's not a slam dunk. After my friend group sort of exhausted the content, we did not want to continue playing. Every couple months we might think "why did we stop playing Risk of Rain 2?" then we'll encounter 3 void seeds in a map, we'll get "risk of rain'd" and suddenly remember that survivors of the void made the game worse.

But missing out on the new items by turning off SotV makes the game less fun in general, so you're stuck in this annoying catch-22 just to get rid of some annoying debuffs. Very frustrating.

I think this dlc quite over-tuned the game against its favour. The void items are pretty overpowered, not only how they work itself, but also how often you can actually get them - you have 1/6 chance for Safer Spaces or Polylute compared to 1/30 chance for Tougher Times or Ukulele, which are practically worse items. Furthermore, the added classes are one of the most powerful in the game due to their high damage and easy item synergies. The enemies are also worth pointing out. Since the release of the dlc most of my deaths were due to the new effects like collapse, which have really high fucking chance to kill you if you accidentally have 5x stacks of these. Blind pests can be very annoying to fight with, and void jailers can end your run by just eliminating them. Despite how fun the new content itself is, as the time passed on I've started to wonder how the devs itself felt about the dlc, since they were burnt out after it so much, they felt no remorse selling the ip rights to new developers, which if you ask me is a good thing after all.

It's hard for me to be objective about Risk of Rain 2 because it's so closely tied to spending time with my brother and my friends. This game has become a regular occurrence, and for the first time today we actually bothered to clear the new Voidling ending in this DLC. The additions of the DLC are amazing, adding new twists to known items and creating a number of new and exciting ways to play the game. The new characters are also awesome, with one adding an interesting stance switching aspect. I'm bummed that Hopoo is moving on from Risk of Rain, but I'm also thrilled to see what they do next.