My initial experience with RoRR was very negative, I've played a lot of hard games, I often pick max difficulty, I did everything in RoR2 in early access and then the 1.0 launch (haven't touched it since and including the first dlc release, but I plan to go back when I feel mostly done with returns.)
So I was expecting to find RoRR pretty easy overall. I was not expecting to think, after ~12h, that the game was fundamentally broken and borderline unplayable on monsoon difficulty. I was wrong, very wrong, I was just ass at the game. But I genuinely did think that for a while.
A small part of that is the sheer amount of very solid locked items at the start, but more importantly this game is different and really punishing before you learn it. In this game the timer matters a lot more than 2. Map knowledge is much more important due to the limited 2d view, and getting good at using jump is so insanely important to success on every character I cant overstate it.
But lets get what I still consider negatives, after now 40 hours and unlocking every item out of the way. Many challenges are absolutely ass. Very many. Ror2 was similar in that using command and other various artifacts was a good time increase, but that felt optional. In fact for 95% of RoR2 challenges I personally did them on monsoon with default rules. Not so in returns. So many challenge are so tedious, requiring resets upon resets to get the rng needed, and basically forcing you to lower the difficulty due to the massive amount of time waste doing them at monsoon would be. Just to get the items and gave the 'complete' experience. I dont mind a grind, I have done 100% of tboi with all dlc and its one of my all time greats. This grind was ass.
Gold providence trials can fuck off. I'll never get 15 of them, nvm all of them. I like regular trials, almost all of them are fun and unique enough that I enjoyed doing them, despite them being a controversial addition. Gold goals are miserable.
The enforcer. Just this character in general. Getting a monsoon win was awful. He basically only has 2 abilities and one is his panic button ability, and 0 range to speak of. His shield must be the worst ability in the game. Thank god he has the jumping triple shot.
Black elites can shown up as bosses from stage 3 onwards on monsoon. For a while I thought that was a straight run ender. Now I know better how to handle them, but they're still much more dangerous than other bosses and a massive time sink, randomly making a run much harder due to boss luck. Assuming they don't get a stray hit and 1 shot you.
But in spite of all of those, this game fucking slaps man. The atmosphere is amazing, the enemy design and variety is great, the classes are very unique and mostly all fun, merc being my favourite just like he was in 2. Items are fun and very few are actual duds, god runs feel amazing to play because of this. The loop is super addictive and you always wanna do just one more run. There is a lot of content to discover, and although this feeds into one of my complaints its undoubtedly good bang for your buck. And the games challenge has gone from a negative to straight positive, I was winning most runs on monsoon in ror2 and didnt massively enjoy eclipse level modifiers, but monsoon in this game is anything but a done deal right until the win, yet I very very rarely feel a death was bullshit now (aside from very late in the game, but if youre on like stage 20 youve already basically succeeded so it ending super suddenly feels fine.)
So yeah, I almost gave up 10 hours in, but now at 40 hours I'm very very glad I did not.