Risk of Rain Kin Bandit

Kin is a straightforward-sounding Artifact whose details require some caveats, rather like Honor. Also like Honor, the technical details of how the game approaches spawning is a lot more evident and important to Kin than to a normal run.

The caveats are...

-Enemies that spawn other enemies bypass Kin. (eg the Ancient Wisp dying will still release Wisps and Elder Wisps, and Colossi will still summon their minions when they clap)

-Boar Beach's initial pool of enemies are not affected by Kin.

-Providence and his Wurms are not affected by Kin.

-Tiny Imps can still be spawned in a Kin run.

Something that's not a caveat; bosses don't bypass it. (Aside Providence and his Wurms) Triggering the teleporter isn't going to spawn a boss, not unless you managed to get the game to pick a boss as its spawn for the level overall. It'll just spawn some Elites, maybe a Blighted enemy, or possibly just a lot of regular enemies.

So spawn mechanic stuff.

I've already been over the points-buy approach to spawning Risk of Rain uses; in the case of Kin, the game has to pick something the director expects to afford reasonably quickly. I'm not sure how much leeway it's given, but I do know you can get bosses picked by Kin, but it's not going to happen until quite a lot of time has passed. So in a 'normal' Kin run where you don't loop and don't stall, probably the only bosses you'll fight will be Providence and his Wurms.

Kin itself is an interesting-sounding idea that's a bit frustrating in practice. You might expect me to complain about how repetitive only fighting a single enemy gets, but no, that's actually a surprisingly interesting part of the game. My actual issue is how uneven different enemies are. This particular run? I got really, really lucky with the game's choice of enemies. (Aside the aggravating point that the game gave me a 56-Leaf Clover and then promptly had the next area be incapable of spawning elites, and then gave me another and had the next area too expensive to spawn very many elites, such that I got zero benefit from them)

Enemies don't have a uniform correlation between their spawn cost and their money drops. I consistently got enemies that have pretty good rates of money drop for their spawn cost. You can easily get stuff like Elder Wisps on the very first level and end up waiting eons to get a dribble of coins once they finally not only spawn in but also, you know, die, which itself takes forever.

I got weirdly unlucky when it came to actual item access -barely any item sources on the second level, an okay amount on the first but I couldn't take advantage of it all because Wisps are relatively expensive for a basic enemy, barely any item access again on the fourth level, weirdly little on the fifth level- but only on the first and final levels did I ever have difficulties covering the costs of what I did have access to. And in the case of the last level, that's pretty normal regardless -there's so many chests/other purchasables, and the weapons chests are expensive and there's almost always at least one gold chest that you have to be unusually rich and/or have an Explorer's Key to save a lot of the costs.

So this Kin run was surprisingly smooth and straightforward... but it could just as easily have been a nightmare where I rolled Elder Wisps on the first level, was thus forced to choose between grinding to get adequate items from the first level or just accept severe losses and move on so I didn't end up in the hole on time instead, and then got mobbed by Parents on the second level. (Who are bizarrely cheap for how durable and hard-hitting they are. It's not like they're slow, either)

The swinginess of Kin ends up frustrating. It tends to feel less like you lived or died on the basis of your own skills and more like either the RNG favored you or hated you. So... I usually don't play Kin runs.

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