Rise to Ruins

Random difficulty spikes, seams for no reason enemies gained 70 additional levels in the middle of the night. Random things appearing to reroute monsters to go through walls. And on top you are limited 200 corrupted tile clearing a day, makes it a time wasting grind. Unoptimized hell later in the game even on lowest settings, constant corpse clear, million of particles.

I just saw the Dev's Twitter for the first time and WOW, what a gross person. Wish I could refund this.

Tl;dr this game is a losing simulator. You will unavoidably lose. There is literally no way to win. This isn't a "gid gud" scenario, you will lose every time, by design. I refrained from writing a review for this game because I didn't want to hinder its progress, just in case the dev wanted to change the direction of the game. It's very sad that I have to say no, but I will explain underneath the reasons why. The game is really cool until you realize what the gameplay cycle is. I haven't played it in a while but I saw some comments and it seems it's still the same. The game isn't difficult. It's impossible by design. I don't mind difficult games. But the whole formula of this game is so that you lose. Let me explain this: 1. The monsters never stop levelling up. Your buildings however have a max level. Therefore there will be a time (and it's not gonna take long) where the monsters overlevel your buildings (and keep on levelling up!). It doesn't even matter how many towers you build, after some time they will be so far ahead that you do 0 damage to them. 2. The corruption spreads, the more you play until it covers the entire map. The more it spreads, the more enemies get spawned. So that means you gotta fight it back right? No. If you fight it back, the game becomes more difficult. So you fight it back to make the game easier, but the game becomes harder instead. But even if you don't fight it back, you're in the way remember? Therefore once it reaches your city, then you are unavoidably fighting it back by simply existing lol. Therefore the game becomes even harder. 3. There is one way to win a map. To do nothing but head to the corruption immediately. When you remove it from the last tile, it won't spawn any monsters. This is more of an exploit than a design though, and if you do that it becomes clear why the dev didn't want you to win. Because that's it. Once you are able to play the game freely, there's nothing to it. Everything is geared towards protecting yourself from the monsters, and defending. So once you do that, the game has nothing else to offer. But read my previous points: the formula of the game is to make you lose. So there's no point in even defending then. 4. You can move your people nomadically to other tiles on the world map. Therefore you might assume that the point is defending and gather resources, move elsewhere, gather more resources, move elsewhere etc, until you're tough enough to start actually fighting the corruption. No. That would make the game cool actually. But that's not its point. Because remember, no matter how many resources you have, the enemies do not have a max level, therefore will always overpower you. Even if we imagined you have infinite resources, your towers at some point will do no damage. 5. TD element. The game initially had this, and it was great. Basically you were supposed to build a maze of towers. That's why there are also slow towers and stuff like that. The enemies would not attack walls unless they had no way of reaching your town. But after some update, the monsters would start attacking the walls anyway, therefore negating this completely. So in the end, you're stuck with towers that's counter-productive to build. Why have a slow tower, if you could build another elemental/arrow/ballista tower? There's no point. 6. God powers. Initially, they matter. But after a while, they are so weak that you are stuck with casting stuff like regenerating resources - mainly food. Also, charm, if I remember, you can take any enemy under your command. So to win, reach the corruption fast, then when a high level fire elemental is spawned, charm it. Do that until you remove the last tile. 7. Upgrading God powers: So you can upgrade certain stuff by mainly doing stuff in the game. These are the "goals", and it can increase your max levels and stuff. Wonderful huh? Therefore, you can at some point overpower the enemies, right? No. We already talked about how enemies' levels are infinite. By finishing a goal, you will, like, upgarde the level of something by 1. Golems if I remember. One level doesn't mean much. The enemies by then will probably be 10 levels ahead already, if you're lucky. 8. The dev doesn't care about these problems. It's been posted time and time again that the game has no purpose, as it's designed so that you lose. Everyone says this. I went to the comments just now to see if anything changed, and I found a comment from 1 hour ago that says the game is unfair etc. Look, I don't want an easy game, by no means. I'm happy with a challenge, even if I lose, because then I know more stuff so I can replay and be better. But this isn't a challenge. This is a losing simulator. Actually, what will happen is that you will replay and replay, and at some point you will realize my previous points and give up, because there is no way to win the game. And just as you're thinking the dev is gonna take notice and do this game justice, they release it from Early Access without "fixing" anything. And I use quotes because I don't think the dev sees these as problems, I really think the dev wanted the game to be impossible. But I don't know why, this game could be cool. Please remember, and I'll say this again and again, your skill doesn't matter. This isn't a "git gud" scenario. You will lose every time because that's how the game is designed. So anyway, yeah, my advice is to steer clear of this game unless for some reason you really want to lose.

When I play Tower defence games, I am basically enjoying watching brainless AI units get destroyed by my gradually improved/upgraded defence structures. It is brutal and not that complex, apart from knowing what to upgrade and when, more or less. That is the fun of that. I don't want it to be too clever. I'm not too fussy - there are lots of tower defence games that work for me. When I play city-builders or other management type games I am enjoying the complexity. I don't like it dumb. My favourite city builders are Workers and Resources Soviet Republic, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, or, especially, Songs of Syx. I want it deep and complex and I want it to reward my brain cells, not kiil them as so many supposedly complex games do these days. Rise to Ruins, somehow manages to engage the part of me that wants brainless, along with the part that likes complex, and gets them to play nicely with each other. It is a fragile arrangement, on occasion, when playing my brain will spasm with a "why is the AI so stupid?" but mostly it works. Because undead, mostly. Also it is, I think, a very cleverly designed game, there are in-game lore reasons why things are as they are and if you cllick with that it is a very fun game with hidden depths. RtR is a game that I am really happy I have in my library because when I need that particular mix of game-play elements it is really fun. If you have ever found yourself wondering what game to play, and not quite fancying any of the tower defence games or city builders in your library - this game might be just the thing. Certainly I have found nothing else like it. I recommend it, works great in linux and if you have problems the dev is very responsive and helpful.

I got hit with back-to-back RNG (Blood Moon/Meteor Shower) which is fine, except that in the aftermath, I couldn't recover from the damage. This is only due to the fact that my villagers simply stopped working and following commands. My farmers stopped watering crops despite having tons of water. My builders also wouldn't stop building something even though I had set the building to lowest priority. My villagers were starving to death and refusing to build the farm which I had set to TOP priority, they chose to build a lumber camp instead. It's a great concept and I was doing fine with the regular waves and the scaling, but two RNG events, coupled with the villagers who don't work or listen killed all interest I had in playing.

When the developer jumped back into the game updates, I was super excited! That excitement died down quickly as there were no further updates and the game feels very much like an unfinished concept. There is other games out there that feel more finished and fun to play. With no further updates incoming, I can safely say, move onto another game or try it on sale.

Colony management mixed with tower defense. You start with nothing, gather food, wood, etc. Build houses and defenses, then fend off the monsters when night time comes. Wow, I fricken love this game, I'm going to play it right after this review. My favorite thing to do is when I have a colony being overrun, I start sending out citizens en masse, to any nearby tile. The death of one colony means the birth of others! Alright see ya, I have something to go do.