Ruiner

What this game is about: You are going through levels killing waves of enemies using melee/ranged weapons (though for me it was mostly melee) as well as abilities that require energy and occasionally fight bosses. What I like about this game: The combat. It is extremely entertaining and challenging: you dash away or to your enemies and hit them with your crowbar using usual or charged attack. You can also place several "dash points" to hit and maybe kill multiple enemies within seconds just like Flash. This comes in handy when you are fighting multiple mobs with ranged weapons. The soundtrack. It is amazing and really sets the mood when you are crushing another creep. The visuals. A lot of gore and explosions, also bonus points for your enemies flying like ragdolls as you are destroying them. What I don't like: It looks like guns are not that useful, but maybe it is just me. Anyway I actually quite enjoy using melee weapons. Random thoughts: The game is quite difficult, though this difficulty stems not from randomness, but rather from the number/types of enemies you fight. You have to be really focused, since even when you play on normal, enemies can still kill you quite fast if your mind wanders off even for a few seconds. By the way, this game doesn't play like Hotline Miami. It is very different from it. Do not buy if if you think that this is the success of HM.

The game is wrapped in style. The art style is A+ absolutely awesome, all the design, characters models, enviroments, art style... it's a pity that there are so many underground environments, like "dungeons", it would have been great to see more environments like roofs, streets, suburbs... The soundtrack are excellent (in the line of other great games like Wrong Number, Fury, Strafe...) The cyberpunk world recreation shown in the game and it's lore are astonishing, the lore is one of the very best thing of the game, there's no need in a game like this, but the lore is deep and interesting. The game has a complete, and very big, data base full of info about the characters, weapons, artifacts, the world... It's a fast paced action game, with many similarities to the outstanding Hotline Miami, but here you can go deeper into the customization, you gain exp. to upgrade the character with habilities (you can have four at the same time, and use it during combat, if you got enough energy of course). There's a small hub, some kind of suburb where you can move freely (but there no much to do, except talk to some npc to obtain some side missions), without counting those two differences the game is pretty much the same as Hotline Miami. The story drive the gameplay, you want to go further because there's a genuine interest on the plot (even if that isn't mindblowing or too original). There are three classic difficulties (easy, normal and hard), the game no matter what, is hard as hell, you will die a lot (I don't tried the easy one by the way). And I already read a message from the developers saying that there will be free stuff in the future. About the duration, depending of your skill playing games like this and the amount of time you will spend admiring the environment... he game is about 6-8 hours long So I recommend it, if you already played Hotline Miami you already know what can you expect, if not, you need to know that is a pretty hard game

Ruiner takes a certain kind of player to enjoy it. It can be very masochistic to play it, you have to expect to die often. Normally I don’t enjoy this kind of game, and truth betold there were times where I didn’t enjoy playing the game, but overall it had a lot going for it. The soundtrack is awesome, the story is good (minus the cliffhanger ending), there are lots of ways to play by how you spend upgrade points, the lore is good and the gameplay is, for the most part, very fun. There are some wrinkles here and there but no game is perfect and not much is major. The gameplay itself is the games main strength. If I can give one piece of advice it is to never stop moving. The game is very fast paced and most of the time when I kept dying over and over in some spots I tended to notice I had stopped moving or slowed down. It is a very tough game but there are ways to help yourself. One of the best parts of the game is that you can reallocate your upgrade points any time you want. Some games don’t allow this and you come to find out ¾ of the way through the game finding out you wish you had of spent the points differently and now are screwed. Ruiner not only allows you to reallocate them it encourages it and I think in some cases expects it of you. More than once when I was having a tough time against a certain enemy I figured out what ability would do a better job against them and experimented finding it. There are a large variety of ranged and melee weapons to compliment as variety of play styles. As far as things that I didn’t like there wasn’t too much. Some enemies you have to face multiple times which I find sloppy and dislike usually. One specific enemy we have to beat 4 times, the last 3 of which are back to back to back. He just keeps getting revived and we have to keep doing it. I find boss fights who can be revived to be a cheap cop out and would rather prefer a smarter enemy. The ending also left a lot to be desired. I am not against cliffhanger endings but the best way I can put it is there could have been more closure than what we got. From a technical standpoint Ruiner was a mixed bag. There was no manual save option. I will give it credit that most of the checkpoints aren’t too far apart but nothing beats the option of manual saves. The game did crash to desktop once on me but other than that ran great. There were also 3 cinematics that only gave me a white screen and one cinematic that the text didn’t display at all. Luckily I was able to watch these on Youtube. The game had four AA levels, Vsync, ability to change difficulty, ALT-Tab support, four other graphics options to tinker with and support for framerates over 60. It did lack ambient occlusion, tessellation and refresh rate options though. Overall the game is well worth playing and was a good amount of fun. It got on my nerves a bit and had some annoying glitches but was worth the journey. I played on Linux and with a keyboard and mouse. My score: 7.5/10 My system: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | EVGA CLC 240 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.1.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming | Corsair AX1200 | InWin 303 White | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.17.11-84.current | AOC G2460P @1920*1080 144hz

After playing for just under an hour I glad I was wrong about the game. Its fun, challenging (enough) and has a brilliant asthetic. Gameplay is pretty simple meaning its easy to pick up and play the game. The core of the game is the combat which gets better and better as you progress, the weapons feel like they are actually doing some damage and the dash ability has been my life saver so far. There are several other abilities and powers you can get during the game and this allows for builds which is werid to say for a game like Ruiner. While there is a story the game doesn't make it the main focus, it understands its a video game first and foremost and gives you the option to skip cutscenes and get straight into the gameplay although on a first run you might want to watch them. My only gripe is lack of voice acting for certain characters, but again this was likely an artistic choice. Its something you'll learn to live with. For me it is jarring to see cutscenes without voice acting but then again this is probably because I'm used to it. Overall even though I haven't really played for that long I was having fun playing the game and is worth picking up.