(spoilers for the alternate route and boss featured in the DLC, if you care about that)
I first abandoned this DLC with the absolutely awful launch, as a torrent of minute and game breaking bugs made the DLC a pain to go through. Later on, a few friends and I went back to play a few games now that the game breaking stuff is mostly fixed, and that momentum from those games gave me the motivation to fully complete the DLC.
This DLC isn't very good, if my rating didn't make that obvious already. The majority of the items are incredibly boring, providing benefits that do so little that you forget that you even had the item. The only one I can remember existing and doing anything of interest was Sale Star, an item that gave you a duplicate item on the first chest you open per stage. And in a hilarious turn of events, looks like Gearbox will be reworking every item except Sale Star. Incredible.
The allure to the DLC is the new additional route to the new final boss, the False Son. Accessing this new route is done through a new shrine, that spawns on stage 1 which has you give money to the shrine till a boss spawns, which drops extra items if you fully charge the shrine. From then on, it is just do different stages, except its basically the same go-to-teleporter progression, except you're ending on a stage 4 now. This feels very undercooked, as adding no new objective to clear these stages just makes em feel nothing like a new route. At least Void Locus had the void cradles to do.
I will say, the new stages themselves are actually really well designed aesthetically. I personally have gripes on the new stage 3 and False Son stage, as manuvering those stages I find to feel rather annoying. The new stage 5 however is so great, with its super open space and vertical design. Genuinely adore that enviroment.
Now, with the new final boss, I was excited to finally get to see maybe something actually worthwhile for once. And we got an exceedingly poorly designed final boss. Mithrix and Voidling are designed to still work with melee characters with clear windows, whilst fighting False Son with a slicing winds Mercenary or double saw MUL-T feels fucking terrible. False Son has relentless melee attacks, making it actually pretty easy to kite with the majority of the characters, but god awful for actual melee minus Loader. The actual gimmick of the fight is based around breaking open these interactables to cleanse debuffs that get increasingly worse with each phase, otherwise the False Son barely changes per phase. This cleansing mechanic seems interesting at first, but is crazy boring when it just comes down to walking towards the thing and pressing E. The final phase debuff is a silence on all 4 of your abilities, which feels like a major cop out for a last stand unlike Mithrix stealing all your items, making False Son annoying rather than having more interesting strategy than just "stand next to cleansing totem".
Now that we've covered that part of the DLC, let's get to the other big aspect of it, the new Survivors.
Seeker, I think is a decently interesting character with mediocre execution. With an ability made to heal and revive your teammates, this is the multiplayer support survivor. The damage output of maximizing your charge feels meh at best to me, and the support aspect feels middling at best in a game that kills you if you stand still for a millisecond anyways. Cool ideas, just pretty meh all things considered.
Chef, I barely have tried as he is awfully underpowered at the moment, and I can't be arsed to actually try and fully finish runs with him. I loved Chef in RoR1, so it was so disappointing to see him in such a sorry state.
The last survivor added, False Son, was certaintly interesting. A gimmick revolving around choosing defense and health regen vs offense and damage based on secondary usage is interesting, but this survivor makes it so boring when its tied to a secondary. Void Fiend from Survivors of the Void avoided this issue with a similar concept through having heavily offense and healing states, when False Son gets so little usage out of anything except the health regeneration. The laser and slam are alright and kinda enjoyable to use, but overall the whole character feels pretty boring to play as.
With all that negativity out of the way, I do wanna touch upon what I do really like about this DLC. Once again, Christodoulou does not miss with his absolutely fantastic additions to the soundtrack, and it is joyous to hear them in game. The track "Yane no Mori", was my favorite, with its incredible heavily Pink Floyd inspired sound. As I said before, the enviroment designs, at least aesthetically are so lovely, and genuine props to Gearbox for making pretty cool enviroments. The realization that the False Son route stages was actually scaling a massive statue of the False Son was so damn cool, and definitely one of my favorite parts of the DLC.
Even with that, the DLC overall ended up being pretty middling. I really wish this was a lot better, as clearly there was great work put into this DLC, just not thought out on the gameplay side of things, and clearly not with how awful the release was with bugs. I will check out the later updates to rework items, and see if that changes my opinions, even if it is unacceptable that a piece of content released like this. Was really sad to see my favorite roguelike be met with such a "meh" piece of content after this Gearbox acquisition.
