RUINER Reviews

Full Review -- Curator Site

Video Review:

Ruiner came to my attention during the Devolver Digital Press Conference in 2017. It’s one of my favorite press conferences of all time and is worth a watch as it’s brilliant comedy. During the conference, two games were shown with Ruiner being one of them. It wasn’t a serious press conference so that game can’t be real, right?

Well, no, Ruiner is very real, and unlike the entire press conference which was done for a laugh, Ruiner is completely dead serious. It’s often called a cyberpunk Hotline Miami and that seems like a good description of the game. The only issue I have is I’m actually not a fan of Hotline Miami. It’s an ok game, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as most people. So that might be worrying but still, I’m giving this a shot.

The obvious difference between the two games is the graphics. Whereas Hotline Miami tried to get to a trippy psychedelic look, Ruiner drops all that and goes straight to cyberpunk. The main character wears a mask that shows a text display as well as images. His face is never shown, his entire interaction is done through these icons, whether it be the words “Kill you” repeated over and over, or “No File” or so on.

The world is gorgeous. The levels are designed to be overly industrialized futuristic technology factories, where there are constant movement and fulfillment of shipping desires. It sounds complicated and the looks are complicated, but it is just amazing visual eye candy. Even though it’s mostly uninteractive, I love the look of machines merging and working together. I’m a huge fan of Factorio due to its production line, so when Ruiner takes place in that production line and uses it as an aesthetic, I get the same feeling from it.

I love the look and feel of the world, the character models are great, enemies feel unique, and the style really makes the art pop. Overall, I adore Ruiner’s graphics most of the time.

At the same time, the music and sounds of the game perfectly complement it. I rarely focus on the music of the game, usually only noticing one or two songs like Civilization 4’s Baba Yetu, but Ruiner’s presentation is near perfect and the music is a huge part of it. I played the entire game of Ruiner with no distraction because the music kept pulling me back to the game. This game has an incredible soundtrack.

It’s not just the music that is incredible, it’s that it also fits with the style and tone of the game that makes for a perfect experience for me.

But, there’s a small problem here. The graphics in the game caused a small issue, there was one point in the game that I wasn’t sure where I could move and I got lost because I didn’t realize I could move upwards on the screen and kept trying to move left and right and down. It’s a shame because those great graphics that I am raving about hurt my enjoyment a couple of times. They look great when they work, but when they failed, well I was stuck for almost five minutes. It’s a minor complaint but at the moment I was really disappointed when I realized what I missed.

The level design in the game is really solid outside of those moments, and it’s a natural progression to move from one room that serves as an arena to the next. The level is usually laid out in a way that has a few side rooms and a path to the next area. The downside is when the game wants to give the player a choice, it’s usually not clear which direction leads to bonus content or even a reward for completing an earlier quest until it’s too late and the game has locked off the path backward.

There’s one other feature of the levels that is a little odd, after each arena room you’re given a score similar to Bayonetta or any game that awards you a score based on skill. At the end of the entire level, you get a score for the entire level. Oddly enough this score isn’t saved. There’s a leaderboard system but that’s for the speed run and arena modes.

With the presentation, the level design, and the rest taken care of we can look at the gameplay of the game, and if the presentation is great, it’s the gameplay that compliments it perfectly.

Ruiner is played with a 3D Isometric style where the player uses both sticks for movement and aiming. At first, you might think this is a twin-stick shooter, and it’s a good thought, however, the player manually fires the gun with the right trigger. In my first look, I comment that it’s an odd control scheme because I just want to fire constantly. But the more I played it, the more I realized that I was wrong.

When I was out of special ammo, it could work as a twin-stick shooter, but the fact is there are tons of gun pickups and I wanted to be very careful about ammo use because those gun pickups tended to be worth saving. There are enough ammo drops that I almost never was back to the default “Ruiner” gun you get in the first level.

At the same time, I didn’t always have to use my guns, the right bumper is used for melee attacks and those are more powerful than the guns so it’s useful to switch to whichever is right for the current situation you find yourself in. The fact is this twin-stick shooter works better by forcing the player to actually use the attack buttons as well. There are also a few abilities like the shield that can be aimed with the right stick and will disappear when you fire a weapon so the original thought that I wanted a twin-stick shooter doesn’t work here.

That’s a lot of thought that went into a simple change to the Twin Stick shooter mentality but the more I played the game, the more I realized that level of thought and consideration went into almost everything in the game.

I will say though, that the one thing that was also challenging was the aiming. With a few shots, you can usually hit your target, but I have auto aiming turned on and often I aim at enemies and my first couple of shots missed them. This might be intentional, it could be the auto-aiming doesn’t work, or I might be making a mistake somewhere else. But after a couple of levels, I realized that complaint wasn’t as bad. The auto-aiming felt better, and maybe I just wasn’t shooting as quickly but something changed and it worked. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing a laser sight to target the enemy. Sometimes it appears in games, but oftentimes the character won’t aim the weapon the way he’s targeting unless it’s right after firing a round.

Since we did talk about the huge amount of thought that went into the gameplay though, maybe the auto-aim has the same level and I just mentally fell in sync with what the developers expected. I’m honestly not sure what changed for me, but if we look at their other designs we can begin to see their genius once again.

The ability tree in Ruiner is… well, I want to say perfect. That’s a really high praise, and I usually hate ability trees, because it’s making a choice and losing other options. Ruiner makes a lot of decisions here that I like.

The first big move is the ability to refund any points spent. It doesn’t require you to refund the whole tree or cost the player anything. You can just remove a single skill and place the points spent on it somewhere else. This is absolutely fantastic, and I wish every game did this. It’s a joy to tweak and play with abilities because you can play with the system knowing that you’ll never make a mistake that can’t be fixed with a couple of button presses.

If you want to read more. you can see the full review with pictures and video at https://kinglink-reviews.com/2018/06/25/ruiner-review/. You can also check out my Curator page at If you want to hear more from me, you can show me that by following my curator at http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi...