Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Rise apologises for nothing in its expansion — the endgame Anomaly hunts are the hardest sustained content the series has shipped.

The expansion where the series stops being polite: Master Rank monsters hit for most of your health bar and expect the matchup knowledge the base game let you skip.

Progression is gated behind bosses you are expected to build an arena for, and the game tells you almost none of that. Hardmode is a difficulty setting you trigger permanently, by hand.

Aim matters less than knowing what the other team can do to you, and the roster is large enough that this takes a very long time to learn.

A game about item literacy: the run is won or lost by whether you recognise a pickup you have never seen before.

Enormous and completely indifferent — most of its walls are optional, and it will never tell you which ones.

Driving it is a fraction of it. The car arrives on a setup that is wrong for the conditions, the game does not say so, and a lap that felt fine can be two seconds off because the tyre pressures were.

Build orders are the curve, and the campaigns teach almost none of what the game actually asks for. The hard AI does not forget its economy while it fights.

Building is a second game bolted to the first, played at a speed that looks like a bug, and the mode that removes it is where most people should start.

Aggressive rather than punishing — dying costs you almost nothing, so the walls are boss-shaped and the rest is spectacle.