Ruiner Reviews

Ruiner turned heads when it was announced last year and I was instantly smitten with its chilling cyberpunk aesthetic and action-driven gameplay. Drawing inspiration from anime like Akira and movies like Blade Runner, Reikon Games has successfully created a violent, dystopian world where murder is currency and trust is obsolete. The year is 2091, and playing with people’s lives has never been easier.

Ruiner is a cyberpunk-style, guns blazing, top-down shooter that pulls no punches when it comes to action. Where the levels lack depth and unique flair, the gameplay makes up for it with a diverse of ways to approach playing.

Ruiner is a fun and fast twin stick shooter that ends all too soon and leaves you asking way too many questions.

Few games achieve the dark and brutal world like Ruiner. A twin-stick shooter with as much difficulty as it has brutality, anyone looking for intense action or a challenge needs to check it out. If you want to know more, I got you covered here with a review on PS4.

Ruiner has some great set pieces and a dark, bleak world that I would normally gravitate towards. Yet when the dystopian renders everyone inhabiting it to be as relatable as raw sewage, there was little for me to latch onto. Maybe you’ll find the world of Ruiner to be more bearable than I did, but even the best films of the genre have a glimmer of hope for the audience to cling to, something Ruiner is devoid of.

However, when a game is purposely difficult solely due to the amount of overpowered enemies it can throw at you, it makes for an unsatisfying experience. This blended with clunky gameplay only amplified my disappointment. I would not be surprised if someone stopped playing twenty minutes into Ruiner with its uninviting gameplay.

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By the time I fought Mother for the third and last time, I was prepared to throw my controller because of how quickly she evaporated my energy and health bars the first two times. Ruiner is one of those games that is unabashedly difficult for the sake of being difficult. It demands you face waves upon waves of the same enemies and mini-bosses before you can even see the final, incredibly trite cinematic. Are you the ruiner or the ruined? I won’t spoil the answer that the game offers up, but I will say that I sure didn’t feel triumphant when I finally set the controller down.

A futuristic feast of fun frustration.

From the gameplay to visuals and an amazing soundtrack, every aspect of this game is polished to near perfection.

I jumped into Ruiner expecting a top-down arcade shooter with an amazing style, pumping beats and weapons and abilities galore. What I discovered was a surprisingly deep RPG full of story, dialogue, character, quests, side-quests, loot rarity and even a world-hub. Oh, and it also had arcade shooting, an amazing style, pumping beats and weapons and abilities galore.

After being relatively quiet for a number of years, the cyberpunk genre has been making a loud return to video games with quality titles like Shadowrun Returns, VA-11 Hall-A, and Observer. The latest addition to the bunch is the unapologetically violent Ruiner. Pulling together bits from Oldboy, Akira, Transistor, and Hotline Miami, Ruiner never reaches the highest points of its genre, but is a fun romp through cyberhell that champions style over substance.

Fighting my way through Ruiner felt like work, and if I weren’t obligated to finish it for the review I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It’s too bad it focuses on being difficult over being fun, because the combat totally works when you’re given access to the full range of weaponry and gadgets and can finally stand up to the nearly endless waves of varied enemies thrown at you. This one is definitely better the second time around. Games should be fun right from when you hit the start button – that’s kind of the whole point – but Ruiner puts you through too much of a hazing ritual to get there.

RUINER is a great game. It’s polished, offers a unique world and some solid combat mechanics. Although it doesn’t necessarily revolutionize the twin-stick shooter, RUINER’S attention to story, graceful and synergistic combat and pacing set it apart from many of its brethren. Fan of the genre or not, RUINER is a game to keep on your radar.

Ruiner marks the first title from Polish developer Reikon Games – and the latest release under Devolver Digital’s publishing initiative. The game fits comfortably alongside the other types of games that the label likes to put its name on, and this is one outing that stands out among an already impressive portfolio.

There are characters to speak to and side-missions to collect, but they either don’t lead to anything or are practically forced upon you. One side-mission is given to you by a police officer who asks you to kill eight targets in exchange for Karma. The problem here is that those eight targets are minibosses you’re forced to fight anyway so you’re sort of given a non-optional side-quest that you’ll complete regardless. Every time I fought one of these bosses the game would congratulate me for knocking another target off my list and I’d just shrug; it comes off more as empty praise. Maybe if you were able to refuse this quest I’d feel a little better about it. Being able to make the game harder for yourself by introducing a set of bosses you’d normally never fight would have definitely been an enticing offer. Another has you finding coins in exchange for a reading of your future, but to get access to those coins you need to do a side-quest for another character who will unlock access to the side-rooms those coins are in. What kind of backwards logic is this where I need to do one side-quest to be able to complete another? The game is littered with all these side-quests to do things that you’re forced to do anyway and it all comes off as pointless. There are also quite a lot of characters to talk to that give the impression that you should be receiving a side-quest from them, but instead all they offer is flavor text for the world. Now don’t get me wrong, getting to hang around Rengkok South is a welcomed breather after going through three levels of non-stop combat arenas, but you can’t help but get the feeling like there were more ambitious plans for this area.

Ruiner is a fast-paced, hectic game of survival, cast in a cyberpunk filled future. A brilliant twin-stick shooter that is sadly riddled with control issues. Yet so full of fantastic artistic stylization, extremely pleasing visual and some pretty technical tricks. Definitely a good strong showing for Polish developer Reikon Games. Here’s to hoping that those control issues are patched. Because if they are, then you’re looking at one hell of an experience for under $20. And if they aren’t, it’s still a fun journey, as long as you don’t mind a few bumps in the road.

Top-down cyberpunk action game Ruiner drips with style and rips into you with challenge.

Diary of a madman

It must be difficult for a new developer to make a name for themselves without having their game be directly compared to other titles in the same genre. This is precisely what Polish developers, REIKON GAMES, have been going through with RUINER. Just looking at RUINER from a basic level, it’s a top-down action shooter with a unique visual style, it features an incredible amount of violence and is being published by Devolver Digital… okay, maybe I understand where some of the comparisons are coming from.