Key Takeaways
- Commando is a basic, DPS-focused survivor, item-dependent and underpowered, offering simple gameplay with quick weak shots.
- Huntress provides decent fire-rate, burst damage, and great mobility, ideal for players who prefer not to aim much.
- Engineer is unique, specializing in defensive play and powerful turrets, requiring support items like Bustling Fungus to excel.
Risk of Rain 2 has a pretty massive roster that's only getting larger with the upcoming Seekers of the Storm update, and it can be hard to get a gist of each character in the game. They all have descriptions, but none of them are particularly helpful till you've logged hours playing the character.
So that's where I come in. I've got around 300 hours in Risk of Rain 2, every achievement, which includes beating the game with every character on Monsoon, and in this list, I've compiled a helpful summary, tips, and recommended items to prioritize with each character.
1 Commando
The Basic Character
- Playstyle: High fire rate, DPS, decent movement ability.
- Unlock Condition: None.
- Recommended Loadout: Either Secondary, Tactical Slide, Frag Grenade.
- Best Items: Any On-hit Item, Syringes, Lens-Makers Glasses, Gasoline.
First off, the first survivor on the roster, Commando, is a DPS-focused character and very little else. He specializes in very quick, weak shots, and is incredibly item-dependent and runs with him survive on whether you get items with on-hit effects. He's simple, easy to understand, but also easily the most underpowered survivor. You can win with him, and good runs with him are very fun, but that's about it.
2 Huntress
Move Fast, Shoot Good
- Playstyle: Decent fire-rate, inbetween DPS and Burst damage, great movement ability.
- Unlock Condition: None.
- Recommended Loadout: Either primary, Blink, Ballista.
- Best Items: Crowbar and/or Syringe, All Crit Items (especially if running Alt Primary), Backup Magazine, Most Damage Items.
Another starter character, Huntress is less easy to play, but great if you don't want to aim and want a character that can get out of situations very quickly. She fires off arrows that you can build to either do heavy burst damage, high DPS, or both if you're lucky. Overall, she's pretty decent, and once you unlock Ballista, she's an incredibly consistent survivor.
3 Bandit
One-Shot King
- Playstyle: Low Fire-Rate, Great Burst damage, incredible range, slow-buildup.
- Unlock Condition: Beat the Third Stage without dying.
- Recommended Loadout: Burst, Serrated Shiv, Desperado.
- Best Items: Crowbar, Gasoline, Mocha, Status effects like Tri-Tip Dagger.
If you're looking for a pure long-range burst survivor whose potential damage ceiling is (technically) higher than every other survivor, run Bandit with Desperado. This awesome special ability gets more damage the more enemies you kill with it, meaning if you consistently kill with it, you get tons of damage. He doesn't have great mobility or movement skills to compensate, but man is he fun.
4 Mul-T
Customized To Your Liking
- Playstyle: Dependant on Skills, usually High Fire-Rate, Decent Melee, Mid-Range, Somewhat slow-going.
- Unlock Condition: Complete the Teleporter 5 times.
- Recommended Loadout: I Like Nailgun, Powersaw, and Power Mode. Experiment with his different primaries to see what you like.
- Best Items: Depends on Primaries, but Attack Speed, Movement Speed, Hopoo Feathers, and On-hit Items are all great.
Mul-T is a super customizable survivor, with a fun DPS melee attack, inaccurate but high fire rate nail guns, great burst damage with rebar, and scrap launcher exists. All of these are valid options, and with power mode, you get to use two at once, but with re-tool, you can use two different equipment. Unfortunately, he's very slow-going at the start, so getting a run going with him can be hard.
5 Engineer
Set Up And Watch The Havoc
- Playstyle: Very slow, with great damage, and great usage of every item, but usually very campy.
- Unlock Condition: Complete 30 stages across any amount of runs.
- Recommended Loadout: Spider Mines, Thermal Harpoons, Stationary turrets.
- Best Items: Most of them, but particularly Visions of Heresy, Bustling Fungus, Movement items, and On-hit items.
Engineer is an incredibly weird, incredibly unique survivor, which means when people talk about items in this game there's usually an "except for engineer". He specializes in camping things out, playing away from the action, and acting as support to his incredibly powerful turrets. Prioritize getting Bustling Fungus, as that'll make the turrets practically invincible when they're near each other.
6 Artificer
Float Above The Fray
- Playstyle: Mid-range, burst damage survivor, with high mobility.
- Unlock Condition: Unlocked for 10 Lunar Coins in the Bazaar.
- Recommended Loadout: Either primary (depending on if you want AoE or status effects, they are the same otherwise), Nano Spear, Ion Surge.
- Best Items: Gasoline, Hopoo Feather, Bands, Crowbars, Flamethrower if you're weird.
Artificer is a weird one. Her main gameplay is gonna be hovering above enemies where they can't hit you, and getting in big chunks of damage with your ice wall and spear, getting in a bit of chip damage with your primary in-between. Her jetpack helps her get around, and it's usually best to go with ion surge and build for burst damage. If someone tells you to run flamethrower, they're wrong.
7 Mercenary
Teleport Behind Enemies
- Playstyle: Close range, tons of I-frames and mobility, high DPS.
- Unlock Condition: Obliterate in the Celestial Portal.
- Recommended Loadout: Whirlwind, Blinding Assault, Slicing Winds, or Eviscerate.
- Best Items: Focus Crystal, any on-hit items, and movement items.
Mercenary is a melee survivor who focuses on swift movement, a high hit rate, and having a ton of I-frames. You can use his primary to preemptively strike twice, then use your utility to burst through enemies, exposing all of them and weakening them, which is great when you use Eviscerate. Using Slicing Winds does give you a projectile and even more ways to apply expose, though, so pick your poison.
8 REX
Healing To Hurt
- Playstyle: Balancing DPS with self-inflicted damage, usually at incredibly long range.
- Unlock Condition: Take the battery from the back of the drop pod to the broken robot on Abyssal Depths (Most easily done with Mul-T and Re-Tool in multiplayer).
- Recommended Loadout: Seed Barrage, either Utility, Tangling Growth.
- Best Items: Bad items (Leeching seed, Medkit), Crit items + Harvester's Scythe, On-hit items, Attack Speed.
REX is a weird one. He's one of the only survivors where healing is any sort of priority, and one of the few survivors where taking Transcendence isn't always a good idea. The downside to playing him is some attacks inflict self-damage, but the upside is that he's also an insane DPS character if you've got the health to spare. On-hit healing usually isn't good, but it's pretty decent with REX, since you get more hits.
9 Loader
Big Punch For Big Damage
- Playstyle: Incredibly fast, Incredibly close range, massive burst damage.
- Unlock Condition: Break eggs on Siren's Call then defeat the Alloy Worship Unit.
- Recommended Loadout: All the defaults, the unlocks aren't great.
- Best Items: Focus Crystal, Bands, Movement Speed (Including hunter's harpoon), Crowbars, AoE like Gasoline.
Loader, one of the most infamously overpowered characters in the game, is like Spider-Man with a pile driver. She hits like a truck, can move faster than one, and her only downside is that the only way to deal with flying enemies is either slowly punching them or throwing out your pylon. Either way, make sure to press the run button every time you swing or let go of a charge, it'll do more damage the faster you're going.
10 Acrid
Status Effect Heaven
- Playstyle: Very hands-off, usually inflicting status effects and staying away from combat.
- Unlock Condition: Clear the Void Fields.
- Recommended Loadout: Poison, Neurotoxin or Bite depending on playstyle, Caustic Leap, Epidemic.
- Best Items: Anything that deals debuffs, AoE items, Focus Crystals, and movement items.
Acrid is possibly the easiest character to finish a run with. Essentially, as long as you're using poison (blight is terrible, by the way), every enemy will die eventually, no matter how big their health bar is. Acrid is great at stomping on the ground, shooting enemies with his special, and watching everyone on the map take poison damage till they're one hit from death. It's a fun playstyle, especially if you find it hard to avoid enemies usually.
11 Captain
Focused On Fundementals
- Playstyle: Almost entirely damage-focused, super slow movement, uses Beacons for free items or stun.
- Unlock Condition: Beat the game.
- Recommended Loadout: Either Utility, Shock Beacon, and Hacking Beacon (or two shocks).
- Best Items: Attack Speed, Movement items, AoE, both On-hit and Burst damage items.
Captain is a superb survivor to learn the fundamentals of the game. He's focused almost entirely on damage, has incredible range when you charge up his primary, and his beacons can help you loot quickly. It might sound bad having essentially no movement skills, but he more than makes up for it, especially if you use stun beacons to lock enemies in place and hit them with your utility.
12 Railgunner
Snipe From Afar.
- Playstyle: Incredibly high burst damage, some movement, focused on aiming and sniping.
- Unlock Condition: Buy the Survivors of the Void DLC.
- Recommended Loadout: M99 Sniper, Concussion Device, Cryocharge.
- Best Items: Crowbar, Bands, Backup Magazine, Visions of Heresy.
Railgunner's great if you typically find yourself playing backline, long-range weapons in shooters. She's able to sweet-spot snipe every enemy, usually killing them in a single hit, and doing an incredible amount of damage each time you land that sweet spot. If you're quick with aiming (which is easier on a controller with gyro ), she is easily one of the best characters in the game, but she does take a ton of skill to play, and her primary ain't great.
13 Void Fiend
Way Too Well-Rounded
- Playstyle: Can do everything, has massive range, a short-range laser, built-in healing, and great movement.
- Unlock Condition: Defeat the Voidling by either going into the purple portal in the void fields, or petting the frog after Mithrix, or finding it on a loop.
- Recommended Loadout: Void Fiend has no alternate abilities.
- Best Items: Crowbar, Attack Speed, Focus Crystal, On-Hit, or Burst damage items. Healing is unnecessary.
Void Fiend is one of the best all-rounders in the game. Though similar to REX, it plays a careful balance between wanting to do damage or heal. Its first form has incredible range (and its shots magnetize for some reason), a big burst option, awesome vertical mobility, and healing. When you fill up your corruption meter by not healing, though, you get massive DPS, more rapid burst damage, and strong horizontal movement.
14 Heretic
A Total Power Trip
- Playstyle: Big DPS, tons of mobility, hard to obtain.
- Unlock Condition: Get every heresy item in a single run, you can't select her individually.
- Recommended Loadout: Heretic also has no alternate abilities.
- Best Items: Only one of every heresy item, Lysate Cell, On-hit items.
These next few are all special cases, so I'll get through them quick. Heretic is a special survivor only achievable when you get all the heresy items from Lunar Pods or the Bazaar (I'd recommend a character with almost entirely good moves, like Void Fiend or Mercenary), she's meant to be kinda overpowered and there isn't much else to explain. She does give you unique Mithrix dialogue though.
The following two characters are new and have yet to be played since Seekers of the Storm isn't out yet. This list will be updated post-release!
15 Seeker
The Support Character
- Playstyle: Mid-range, most likely burst damage with decent movement.
- Unlock Condition: Who knows, probably just for buying the DLC.
- Recommended Loadout: Who knows.
- Best Items: Most likely mobility items, Attack Speed, Bands, and Crowbars.
Now for the characters that ain't even out yet (at the time of writing). Seeker is an interesting case, a mid-range, projectile-based survivor with two different crowd control moves, and the ability to revive teammates. I'd imagine you'll wanna prioritize attack speed and mobility when playing her, but I haven't so you'll just have to figure that one out.
16 CHEF
Cooking Up Something Good
- Playstyle: Short-range, heavy on the status effects and DPS.
- Unlock Condition: Who knows...
- Recommended Loadout: ..I definitely don't.
- Best Items: Most likely Attack speed, AoE, on-hit items, and status effects.
CHEF, one of the most heavily requested survivors ever, is being added in the upcoming DLC as well. He boasts a cleaver that boomerangs back and looks great for on-hit items once you've built up attack speed. He also seems to love inflicting status effects, including getting several at once without any items, so Death Mark and Bleed should be pretty essential.
The sequel to the original game, Risk of Rain 2 comes from Hopoo Games. In this roguelike that mixes both sci-fi and adventure, players can combat the world’s alien threat using survivors of different RPG-style classes while upgrading them and gathering new items to grow powerful. Risk of Rain 2 can be tackled in a solo mode, but the game also has co-op gameplay for those looking to jump in with friends.
Third-Person Shooter
Roguelike
OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Rating:86/100Critics Recommend:96%
Released September 11, 2020
Developer(s) Hopoo Games
Publisher(s) Gearbox Publishing
See at Steam See at Xbox Games Store
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