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 | InWin 303 White | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.17.11-84.current