I remember playing this game for many hours as it was still in early access and I do still have a bit of fun playing it! However, this game now has to contend with the likes of Rimworld and it falls flat there as the characters themselves in your colony are essentially blank slates that do anything and everything. You can't control them individually and in that case it reminds me of some games like Simcity and such where you are more, watching over and trying to nurture this society as opposed to have full control over everyone's action or that they may have personalities of their own.

The people you look after are generally humans, but quite often if your place looks nice you'll periodically gain more people from not just breeding but refugees who arrive and are instantly willing to work, though I like that fact they they're cat people with ear and tails! I'd imagine this would cause issues with the doggos you can adopt and help you transporting goods everywhere and fighting the monsters. They're good boys.

Many buildings have a static and simple upgrade, but others like the housing can split into more luxury places that only slightly increase housing for others, but makes them feel more comfortable, slum like places with lots of extra space, but not too comfortable and an option that's between the two.

I do like the idea of fighting off this corruption and even maybe one day completely filling the map, but that's a lot to ask for and even the fun little extras that you unlock, with added achievement intergration, can't keep my attention much anymore.

It's certainly not a bad game, but there's much better out there. I'll still say, this is worth playing though of you've got a potato for a computer and can't run Rimworld with several hundred mods like I have!

Rise to Ruins is a fairly simple colony builder with some unique aspects. It obviously takes a page from Dwarf Fortress, but adds in some mechanics reminiscent of Populace and tower defense games (neither of which added a ton for me). I found a lot to like about it, but it doesn't quite bring what I want out of a game of this type.

The setting is pretty generic -- peasants building in the wilderness while fighting off a spreading corruption. It is enough to motivate and Rise to Ruins also zooms out to encourage you to take over one area, then move onto other areas in the same world with different challenges, which is pretty unique and cool. The setting also leads into the tower defense aspects of the game. Enemies come in waves over a long period of time, so defense of your settlement (most efficiently by building walled mazes with towers) is a large part of the game once you get your colony established. I don't find the repetitive nature of tower defense to be super compelling, but it works ok for what it is in the game.

I like the way Rise to Ruins looks. It is straightforward pixel art that is well done and appealing, though it doesn't quite get across as much of the personality of different characters as I would want to feel attached to any of them.
The building is probably the most interesting part of the game, in that you sort of designate areas for specific purposes and you can freely build roads and things over your buildings, which gives the village a very organic feel in the end.

Managing the colonists is sort of unique, but works pretty well. You assign numbers of colonists to a building, and the system figures out who to assign (basically like Frostpunk). This is good for a hands-off, easy way to handle this, but can feel bad when the system assigns non-optimal people to a job. Rise to Ruins sort of wants you to not care so much about the specifics here, which also removes some of your attachment to specific characters and the specific stats on the characters work against this.
Rise to Ruins does a great job of surfacing problems and letting you fix them, which is cool. It will tell you someone is dehydrated or a house doesn't have food, but leaves you to figure out how to solve that.

One interesting feature in the game is the use of spells, like in Populous. You generate magic power and can use this power to heal your colonists, call down fireballs, summon golems, and other things. This brings a unique facet to the game, but took away from the colony building aspects to me, since the spells feel like they override any need for preparation in some cases or feel pointless if you are actually prepared.

I had a fun time with Rise to Ruins, but am unlikely to do much more with it. It brings something unique to the genre with its heavy dependence on tower defense and spells, but it isn't really what I am looking for with this type of game.