When I first jumped into the Early Access phase of Risk of Rain 2, I enjoyed my time but naturally wanted more.

The sequel follows the same basic pattern as the original: go through levels collecting various items to affect the character's attacks and become as powerful as possible before ending the game, either in death or by defeating the boss.

Fans of the previous game will be happy to know that, other than the 3D gameplay, Risk of Rain 2 feels like the first?

After choosing a character, players travel through various environments collecting items that alter their skills, movement, and everything in between.

Because if so, that next boss is probably going to be way harder than you thought, and your items might not have been worth it.

The items, including equipment, can be bought in each stage using money accrued from killing enemies.

Players will often find themselves with a chunk of money at the end of a boss fight, which leads to the aforementioned risk versus reward of spending it on the map or moving onto the next zone.

These coins can be used in a myriad of ways, including gaining powerful items that also come with downsides and choosing the next level to occur, which is important for various character challenges and unlocks.

Now, there are three difficulty levels and even gameplay modifiers called Artifacts that make the game and the challenges much more trivial, but considering the default difficulty is self-described as "the way the game is meant to be played," it feels disingenuous to make some of these challenges as ridiculous as they are.

For example, the Commando is the default/main character in Risk of Rain 2 — the bog-standard archetype that anyone can pick up and play to start learning the game.

Another character needs to land the killing blow on a specific boss which I haven't even seen yet.

Melee characters are also at a distinct disadvantage in many scenarios, especially the last boss (more on that later).

After the fifth world, players have an option to either loop and head back to the first world (but at a much higher level of difficulty) or go on to fight the final boss.

Anyway, outside of completing some challenges, there is no reason to actually do the boss fight.

The final boss fight is so poorly done that I have almost nothing good to say about it.

The boss himself is cool to look at, but a painful slog to fight.

He does an insane amount of melee damage — marking yet another huge disadvantage to any melee character — and certain characters literally can't be touched by him because they'll be airborne most of the fight.

If the player invested in turrets, they are now useless because they don't even make it to the final arena and get stuck along the way.

It's easily one of the most discordant boss fights I've ever encountered, so antithetical to what makes the core game good that I'm honestly baffled.

There's a fixed seed that players can compete in for leaderboard status (and to complete one of the previously mentioned way-too-hard character challenges) as well as a game mode that's even harder than the hardest difficulty if you hate yourself I guess.

Not getting items, including the items that the boss drops, creates a huge power imbalance between characters.

On PC, I frequently had Risk of Rain 2 freeze up on me for a few seconds before resuming which, in a game as chaotic as this, is no good

Despite my qualms with certain challenges and the last boss, I cannot get enough of Risk of Rain 2