Rise to Ruins

I have been a long-time [i]Retro-Pixel Cast[/i]... *Ahem* Sorry "[i]Rise to Ruin[/i]" player. "God-like, top-down, village/colonization, tower defense, survival against an evil environment" simulator. You set out with a band of not-so-hardy settlers to settle otherwise-pristine lands. You guide the construction/upgrade of buildings, allocation of labor, and designation of resources to harvest and your settlers do the rest. Your interactions - as the local diety - are generally hands-off, that is, until the evil of this new land shows up to take back what the feel is theirs, by right... by force. There have been many different iterations of the core mechanics throughout its current development. Expanding from a few single maps to an expansive continent-wide colonization campaign. Most mechanics I like, some I don't. I tend to not enjoy overly difficult games, or games that are 'hard' just for the sake of being hard. Perma-death (or other 'Hardcore' mechanics) is generally avoided by me in most titles I play. That said; thankfully, this game has many different difficulty settings that encourage the playstyle that best suits the individual player. Some (like me) enjoy the experience of a (somewhat) peaceful City-building sim (think 'Banished', 'Dyson Sphere Program', 'Captains of Industry', or 'Factory Town'), while others enjoy 'Dwarf Fortress' levels of masochism (aka: Fun™) but dialed up a few extra notches. This game has everything in between those two ends of the difficulty spectrum, with much of those settings also customizable. This 'one-man dev team' Indy title is definitely worth a good look, whether on sale OR at full price. All the future expansions and updates are completely free, because that is how the Dev belives it should be. [i]*Update: Aug 2023 just saw the year-long release of "Update 2" which revamped a whole host of features like the global perk/bonus system and added several more features on top of what was already a pretty fleshed out game*[/i]

I've gotta say, it's been years since I played this game and the game still feels like it's... incomplete. Once you've established one settlement, there seems to be no point on building another as you will just do the same thing over again (but faster due to immigration). There is no endgame goal or victory. People might disagree with me that its already complete but do not listen to them. The game is brutal and enjoyable at early stages but once you established your settlement, there's no longer point on playing the game longer

why are people starting to not recommending this game? it's so well made and fun.

So much yes. Ive written a review for this game prior but after playing off and on for the last few years of owning this game I saw that review button and wanted to re-contribute. Playing this game is a great experience overall and I would recommend this game a million times to anyone. Rating: 10/10 The Art (OMG the art is so great): This game has the most beautiful pixel art that makes the world seem really alive. almost everywhere you see is satisfying eye candy. Almost everything in the game that isn't an inanimate object has animations. People, animals, and monsters all have unique animations for most actions, rain collectors have animated rain pooling into the funnels, rain washes off the building roofs. There are so many beautifully animated particle affects that most items or objects emit including the UI itself! Weather/environmental effects really pull you into the world what with clouds casting shadows and rain making you feel chilly in the winter/fall. Literally at any time, just zoom into your village and look at everything and you can see how much work the creator put into the art. The Gameplay: When playing the game it takes your usual top-down town simulator approach and has you making resource harvesting/refining buildings and houses to feed your people and keep them out of the rain. You are essentially a god that can cast spells to do all kinds of useful actions. These spells can range from calling down lightning strikes to summoning work golems or even blessing your pregnant villagers to create demigod children with improved stats (some spells you cant do unless you have enough villagers since they increase your mana)! You start off by choosing any area on the overworld map that you want to start your empire from and then over time you can migrate villagers from that map tile to the next, slowly making a chain of kingdoms each having their own history and layout. Watch out though, you have to do all of this while trying to defend against the ever growing threat of the corruption on each map and the monster waves that spawn from there every night. Game Mechanics: I cant begin to tell you how many hidden and unique game mechanics this game has. The villagers all live their own lives and do their own tasks while every villager, animal and monster has their own XP bar, stats and inventory. Monsters build evil buildings in the corruption that can increase the number of spawned monsters and when you fight back the corruption (it can be done but its so hard) every tile that gets removed can spawn more monsters even during the day! For a 2d top down game you will be pleasantly surprised that the environment can be manipulated in many ways as long as you have the spellpower or the villagers with the proper jobs to do it. When playing you will find that you can build a trade center to buy and sell resources/equipment but something it doesn't outright tell you is that when you sell stuff in one village the store in another village will let you buy the stuff you just sold (quick way to move stuff from one side of the map to another). Things like this are constantly surprising me and with the new updates being added I am sure there will be more cool ideas to try to improve your gameplay. Community content: Unfortunately there is a severe lack of Fan content for this game so it suffers greatly when it comes to looking up specific game play mechanic tutorials or finding neat challenges to try. If the community had more content creators making gameplay mechanic tutorials or fun game play challenges I think it would be way better received by newcomers. There is some great content though so one or 2 videos will basically show you how to effectively play the game so don't despair! Closing thoughts: At first I suggest new players look at a couple gameplay videos to get an idea of the way of things but as you play you will definitely notice when things are and aren't working in your village as the game has many useful an intuitive stat/event tools built in game to help manage everything efficiently. I have spent countless hours managing my towns, choosing what jobs villagers should be hired to, upgrading the different resource collection systems you can make, designing/upgrading defenses and managing the waves of monsters that attack most nights. Many, many nights I've realized it was way late and had to go to bed or I wouldn't get enough sleep because I am always needing to prepare for the next nights defence or fix an issue that popped up due to overpopulation or some random event. I will continue to play this game for a very long time and I suggest anyone who is curious and likes pixel art or town simulator games to give it a try!

Good game, bad dev. The level of talking about the "Steam Community" and the people that play the game over X and other media plattforms is not nice. Get some therapy and overwrite development to someone else. You produce and release and you get money. The players owe you nothing else. nothing else... but you still insult them. Lol

I wish I could love this game. It's got tons of charm, unique machanics and an amazing artstyle. But after watching a single slime destroy 3 buildings without anyone lifting a finger and me not being able to do anything about it I realised I was fighting the unreadable UI and moronic pops to much to be having fun. The world is unforgiving and there is to little I can do about it. you cannot direct troops. Nor are they very enclined to engage the enemy. The spell will hit you own buildings before hitting an enemy. and even if they hit it's not much. I''m on a 1440p ultrawide and the UI does not scale. Text is TINY. Never mind making out the icons. Wich would be a minor incovenience if the information I could make out makes sence... According to the statistics: 26 vilagers while topleft clams 21 total population.. and 6 soldiers and 1 child. of which 18 are housed. in 38 available houses.. makes no sence to me... I'll come back when the UI can scale to readable and the pop AI gets fixed.

Incredibly fun game. Feels a bit abandoned by the dev as of late. Would like to see more things fleshed out. My game still crashes at 3x speed when my town gets a bit large. Luckily it's still playable at 2x just fine. I suggest getting this on sale if you like tower defense and colony sims. Edit: I appreciate the developer response. Life gets in the way sometimes, and that's OK. I am happy to hear there is more content planned. I enjoy your work. Good luck.

After more than 200 hours on the game I guess I might a short review for others. This is a colony sim, in the likes of Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld or Odd Realm. As other colony sims it is really hard and your colonies will often fail, especially when you start out. There are quite a few things that set this one apart from others and in my opinion often make it superior. Rise of Ruins mixes in elements of god games, especially in the way you can cast spells or pick up items and colonists to put them somewhere else. Also enemies. Dropping enemies into a cullis gate is hella fun. The other is tower defense, which is a weird addition, but it works quite well. The game has a growing corruption, which spawns enemies, which attack at night. You will have to defend your village. This adds some more pressure in an already hard game genre. But colony sims tend to get easier after you overcome the first hurdles of building up basic infrastructure. Here the corruption and monster hordes come right at the right moment to keep up the challenge. And if that still feels too scary: among the strong difficulty options you have a peaceful setting, which transforms the game into a much more classical colony sim experience. Additionally even failed runs give you progress into additional unlockable advantages that may make your future run a little more easy. As the mentioned number of hours I sank into it proof, this combination works very well for me and I assume there might be more like me who get invested in such a game. To address some common criticism: Yes, the game is hard. As every colony sim you will have to learn to juggle a lot of systems. As I mentioned you have plenty difficulty options that can help you to craft the right experience for you. If it is too challenging, switch for an easier option until you have a better understanding of some of the systems. Also, towards the mention of the game being abandoned: the game is complete as it is! Sure, there can always be things added, but the game is a complete and even rich experience, and I cannot see bugs really. All the 'bugs' I see mentioned are a misunderstanding of systems. So it is really impressive and if a single developer takes a breather after delivering such a great game, I am fully supporting it. It is not like this is a broken mess. So overall: if you are into these kind of games, played other colony sims before, you might enjoy this one, as it shakes up the formula without losing what makes colony sims great in the first place. I cannot see any other game like this in the genre, so you might miss out if you pass it over.

The game feels unfinished. I played a single map and more or less hit a stalemate with the enemy forces. I feel like I explored most of the game content and as it turns out, a lot of it is irrelevant and the real strategy is about putting down lights as these stop the enemy territory expanding. It doesn't really seem like you can beat them though either. It's not clear what the other maps are about or how they relate to the first one as it seems like you could/would just continue playing indefinitely on one map. I think it took me two different installs to get to this amount of hours which probably says quite a lot It didn't do it for me unfortunately and I got bored (twice!). It's a shame as there are some interesting ideas in here and what is there is fairly polished, I'm just not sure it makes much sense