Risk of Rain 2's March expansion is adding a horde mode and an FPS sniper hero

It's fitting for Risk of Rain 2, a roguelike all about excess, to still be stacking on new features a year and a half after launch. After a major free update last year, Risk of Rain 2's developers are almost ready to put out their first paid expansion, Survivors of the Void, on March 1. It includes an endless wave-based survival mode, but the big news is that the new Railgunner hero transforms Risk of Raina into a first-person shooter.

Well, not completely, but you really can aim through a scope with the Railgunner's sniper rifle. The Railgunner is all about massive damage shots and one-hit kills. Other Risk of Rain 2 survivors can stack items for greater crit chance, but those don't work on the Railgunner—because sniper scope already reveals weak points on enemies that take 1000% damage from a sniper bolt. (Crit chance items stack on more damage for the Railgunner instead).

Those huge sniper shots are just the Railgunner's basic attack: she also has a couple abilities for knocking away nearby enemies or propelling herself out of danger. The Railgunner can also perform a Gears of War-style active reload to get a new shell in the chamber more quickly and deliver more damage on the next shot. Her ult, as you'd expect, is an even more powerful sniper shot that delivers 4000% damage and overheats the weapon.

The $15 expansion is also adding new enemies, areas, and the horde mode, which sounds like an evolution of the Void Fields stage already in the game. You fight off endless waves of enemies, earning an item every round and facing a boss every five rounds until death inevitably takes you. Expect some random artifact mutators to throw everything into chaos from time-to-time, too.

Hopoo Games has more in store for Survivors of the Void that it hasn't revealed yet, including another playable survivor. Since the Railgunner is all about ranged damage, I'm betting the other new character will be more of the up-close-and-personal type.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).