Well, Survivors of the Void is a tricky DLC

I hadn’t played Risk of Rain 2 in a while, so when someone informed me that a DLC was coming out soon, well, I decided to get the DLC straight away, because I like Risk of Rain 2. And, so far, it’s been fun!

Fun but deadly

There’s lots of cool stuff in Survivors of the Void. Including the Void. And the Void Fiend. Survivors of the Void introduces two new characters and a general Void theme, as well as new levels and new items. Basically Void Everything. And all that void-y goodness wants to make you dead. There’s also a person with a sniper rifle, but why would you want to play as a sniper in a horde shooter game? Railgunner is alright, I guess.

The new stages are cool

We ended up with some nice new levels. We have three new level variants: Siphoned Forest, a slippery and icy domain; some weird architecture in Aphelian Sanctuary; and Sulfur Pools, literally a collection of poisonous sulfur pools. However, these new levels are pretty damn dangerous. Most of the new enemy variants can be found here, and the levels themselves are very large. What caught me off guard in particular was running into mini-gun-holding enemies on stage 2, when visiting Aphelian Sanctuary. The Sanctuary and the Sulfur pools are genuinely more dangerous compared to Siphoned Forest and can spawn much deadlier enemies.

They all look cool though. Definitely some nice variation to the existing levels.

Not really for newbies

While there is a lot of content, there’s also a lot of hard content. With all the new mobs and enemy types, it may be better to do a few runs without the DLC, just to ease yourself in a little bit. Why? Because Survivors of the Void introduces some hideously powerful new enemies. Gup is adorable and fine, but damn, we now have EVEN MORE annoying flying enemies that are hard to hit. I’ve mentioned how the Lesser Wisp is annoying, but the new flying slime bat enemies are even worse.

But there’s also something fucky with the difficulty in general. Everything feels like it hits harder, and enemy spawns are decidedly more deadly, especially early on. With two players, I noticed that there seemed to be less loot to grab, while enemies can easily screw you over by healing themselves. For someone who normally plays vanilla with random loot (i.e. not using the Command artifact), it’s been a genuine struggle. Even on Drizzle.

We can share

There is some good news though. If you are curious about the DLC and want to try it, you can do so quite easily. If the host player has Survivors of the Void, then everyone else in the party can pick up new items and explore the new levels. However, keep in mind that DLC-less players don’t make any progress or lore or anything while playing.

So, basically, if you want to try the DLC, just find a friend who has the DLC already and play with them.

But for now, I think I might just switch back to the vanilla game. Because holy shit, Survivors of the Void is a hard DLC, much harder than the base game.