Ruiner hails back to the old style of twin stick shooters with some beautifully detailed HD graphics and a gruelling playstyle that may challenge some and provides an entertaining experience that you will want to play through again and again. On first play I found Ruiner to be extremely difficult, the game sprawls across 14 challenging levels that will increasingly test your gaming skills resulting in a fully powered up version of your character you will want to explore with.
In Ruiner you play a man with text for a face, being fed information from a mysterious woman to seek revenge on your kidnapped brother by continually killing people. It is your typical revenge tale that incorporates a lot of Cyber Punk influences (think Blade Runner, Ghost In The Shell etc) blending together some interesting characters and technological horror (T2!) It’s not just the visuals and story that works, the soundtrack and score is surprisingly addictive and I found myself clamoring to find it on YouTube as I was playing.
Gameplay wise it is a pretty standard walk down a corridor, two doors lock trapping you inside, once you kill of waves upon waves of enemies the doors mysteriously open and you move onto the next area, fortunately these goons drop new guns and loot when you kill them and figuring out how to get past each of them is the part of this game that shines. The boss battles are unrelenting and brutal and seeing that Game Over screen nearly brings a tear to your eye.
You will need to be vigilant with your skill tree as the different type of enemies need different skills to be eliminated. One thing that surprised me about this game was the rewards for exploring, you can gain extra XP, health and even weapons as a reward for searching every corner of every level. It is an extremely rewarding and surprising feature of this game that kept the game-play hours up. The only thing missing is a new game plus mode which would have been great to replay with added difficulty and different modes, that being said it is still alot of fun to replay as you really get a feel for how the game plays at the end.
Fast food gamers will find no love here with a need to consistently be persistent in the quest to conquer this game, the rewards are there for the brave who persist with beautiful graphics, a stellar soundtrack and incredible replay value, Ruiner is the game you need to play if you enjoy a challenge. I have gone back to this game several times to put my maxed out skills to the use after finally conquering the game the first time around.
Ruiner was reviewed using a final “retail” downloadable PS4 code provided by Devolver Digital.
