Surprised at how fast I beat it after hearing all about how hard it is. That one left trigger ability, Overload, is overpowered. Game was fun enough for me to play all of it in two sessions. More games should have this flexible of a respec system to encourage experimentation, too.

Even with my relatively quick 5-hour playtime, the encounter variety fell off even quicker. There were missed opportunities with adding complexity, as enemy types and arena designs are very clearly segmented. Feels like if the game had mixed and matched elements, it would have been more interesting all the way through. Still, the combat was satisfying enough for me to finish it.

The aesthetic excels at what it's trying to do with its harsh red and black palette, cool blue industrial light glow, grimy graphic novel portrait art, and bright arcade effects with a smattering of glitch visuals. Soundtrack is oppressive dark synthwave that's great to pump through headphones with the lights out.

The writing generally matched that vibe as everyone is just an asshole or downright abusive. Themes of control and coercion are omnipresent, but the game doesn't really give the storytelling room to breathe. It's the most apparent with how abrupt the ending is, and it's pretty egregious leaving out the motivations of a major character for a potential sequel that's probably not happening.

There is an earnest attempt at worldbuilding that I appreciate, but none of it is explored through gameplay outside of some surface-level enemy archetypes. The hub area could have been that one place to bring the narrative and mechanics together, but aside from a handful of very simple sidequests, it also feels like something the devs wanted to do more with it but ran up against time and budget constraints.

Ruiner's a short entertaining burst of adrenaline that I maybe would replay on hard once if I didn't have other games I want to get through before I jump into the next-gen, but that's about it. The soundtrack will probably get more spins from me.

Esperava muito quando comprei, talvez por isso acabei me decepcionando um pouco. O combate não é como imaginei que seria, lembra Hotline Miami, mas é um pouco estranho: não é tão fluido e constantemente sentia que os comandos estavam fora do meu controle e não respondem de maneira rápida, o que me tiltava pra caramba ao enfrentar chefes. Acho que em um jogo frenético como esse, é essencial que os comandos sejam fluidos e respondam de maneira rápida.

Além disso, as cores e o visual do jogo são sim LINDOS, porém alguma coisa me incomoda e me deixa meio enjoado e com dor de cabeça depois de certo tempo jogando. Uma pena, queria muito ter gostado de verdade desse jogo.

The game demands precise, twitchy gameplay, but the controls don't support that. The most specific issue is that the dash happens when you release the trigger because you can multi-dash, but I didn't encounter a single situation where multi-dash would be useful in 5 hours. This means that the dash button is designed for you to hold it down, but the encounters are designed for you to tap it, so your character feels sluggish and unresponsive in a game that's all about going fast.

Also, this game handles the sensitive subject matter associated with cyberpunk media (e.g. poverty, ableism, body horror) with the least amount of care I have ever seen. It doesn't have anything to say about those subjects, it just makes them as grotesque as possible for shock value. This game doesn't have any new ideas, but it sure is a collection of all of the worst ones.

This game makes me appreciate The Ascent so much more. The gameplay is similar, but feels much better in The Ascent, and the story has some interesting ideas/visuals.

An enjoyable and cathartic top down action game dripping with atmosphere and adrenaline that's let down by being half baked in a number of small-yet-crucial ways. A lack of voice acting in cutscenes cripple what's already an otherwise threadbare narrative and setting. An inconsistent, busted scoring system ultimately sucks the fun out of learning (and experimenting with) the game's various mechanics. A general sense that the game was hastily scaled down from 'Cyberpunk Diablo' to 'Devolver Digital 4 hour romp' that leaves a hubworld barely visited and underutilized...

...But even then, I still found myself with plenty to love. I'm absolutely blown away at how gorgeous the visuals are, both in terms of fidelity and in art direction. This is punctuated pitch perfectly by one HELL of a soundtrack, with the highlight being 'Island Door (Paranesian Circle)' by Susumu Hirasawa of all musicians. And yeah, I'm ultimately a sucker for this type of 'Devolver Digital 4 hour romp', blood, gore, ethically questionable narrative and all.

It's yet another game, then, that I'll recommend when the sales start again. It's a damn shame, while also being a damn good time, too!

(...Dunno what all the Puppy Play shit's about tho, put a leather dog mask on the MC and get it over with lol)

On the foggy streets of Rengkok South, destitute cyborgs loiter around flickering neon lights, spread thin under the towering headquarters of the HEAVEN Corporation. Painted in the rust of body mods and neurotechnology, bodies are thrown into the cybernetic grinder, a new coat of inescapable sickly red floods the alleyways and crosswalks. Bound to black market contracts and transhumanist dehumanization, the denizens of this neo-Purgatory live cheap lives and meet horrid ends.

Cut whole cloth from the script of a thousand cyberpunk stories, RUINER’s world isn’t a unique one. Biotech gone amuck, Capitalism encroaches on it’s hellish end state, and the only person willing to stand up to the one watching over it all is a faceless, nameless psychopath. A story sold to the tune of “whoa, cool robot”, the game wears its influences on its sleeve. A dash of Akira here, a slice of Ghost in the Shell there, some odd Berserk nods to taste. RUINER isn’t an original story by any stretch, but in all reality, you don’t come to it expecting some groundbreaking plot. You expect hyperviolence; grindhouse extremity backlit by LEDs, a crimson wash from a lead pipe brush, to the head splitting tones of weapons-grade darkwave and witch house.

A surface level comparison to Hotline Miami is obvious, I mean, same publisher, same gorehound vibe, same top-down arcade pastiche, complete with timers and letter grades, and a high dose of difficulty to put it above its contemporaries… RUINER and it’s 80s tinged buddy are close, but where the comparison falls apart is in the feel. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a load of mechanical similarities connecting the two, but whereas the former thrives on the minute-to-minute tension of quick, unrelenting death, where a single mistake will spell a splatterhouse finale for our favorite Drive wannabe, RUINER rips through swaths of nameless corporate goons and extremist mercenaries, flipping through an endless array of weapons, blasting, cleaving, and crushing anyone in his path, packing frag grenades, reality bending energy shields, and flash-steps out of a shonen anime. It’s comparing a sociopathic mad lad with a mask fetish to a literal murdering machine, who… also has a fancy mask. Maybe the comparison isn’t so unheard of.

Gameplay wise, RUINER doesn’t stand out as exemplary, sitting somewhere between mediocre and alright depending on the moment-to-moment twists the game throws at you. The one and only area the game fully strives on is it’s presentation. The moment the feel of the world clicked for me was wandering the streets of Rengkok South, a wall of fog casting a smoky haze. As I walked by Time’s Square-style LED billboards, the mournful wails of Susumu Hirasawa’s Island Door cut through the mist, a second of harmony between the soundscape and the world that Reikon Games built out of an obvious love of the genre. There’s very little I loved about RUINER, but the style of the game deserves mention, especially in regards to the soundtrack.

RUINER is deeply flawed, and I don’t see much reason for anyone to stick through until the end: I mostly did because I found a single character cute, and anyone who knows me will guess who in about zero seconds. But as a replication of a setting that’s been done to death and patched together again, it shows such an obvious love for the inspirations surrounding it. That’s not enough to make an interesting game, but it’s enough to make me think fondly of this weird, messy, flawed shooter.

The game is definitely fun and even somewhat challenging at times, the soundtrack and the visuals are great and you can see the inspiration from Akira and other cyberpunk sources. Sadly it all falls flat when the actual presentation hits: there's voice lines for win/start quotes but not for the cutscenes, there's one scene with handdrawn graphics hyping up a change to go back to the boring level graphics that look all the same, there's the same effect going on screen over and over again, a scoring system that has no need to be here given how unreplayable the whole affair is, and so on. Thankfully (or maybe sadly?) the game ends pretty fast because I wasn't up to fight in other easy arenas with a bunch of enemies slowly spawning in. Overall I don't hate this game but there's nothing memorable about it.

RUINER might be a short game, but covers every aspects of the twin-stick and cyberpunk genre well enough that it can be replayed - qualified - as an arcade-type game. Many inspirations surround the red-tinted world of Benedykt Szneider.

While the Akira and Ghost in the Shell inspirations are blantantly obvious, it strands on its own playing around its BDSM and Murderporn thematics. Reflected upon its unforgiving difficulty, RUINER is a harsh mistress, you will be dying a lot trying to complete each challenge room. Luckily the game lets your respec your character skills at will to compensate. Cheater cheater!

While challenge is obviously a core thematic of the game, post-release patches notably made the game easier with an apology from Reikon, it still offered enough of a challenge to clear through on our second playthrough.

This game is seething style. You're a psycho killer from an isometric pov in a techno- cyberpunk world. I gave it a try for $3 while waiting for The Ascent to go on sale. Gameplay is made up of running through heavy machinery into combat arenas. Unfortunately, the game lacks any of the tactical considerations found in something like Hotline Miami. And what's worse is that the game allows you to instantly respec your skills, leaving you with a constant nagging sense of maybe having chosen the wrong combination, or doing something wrong. You'll be wondering that a lot too because combat does not feel great. Enemies just RUN at you and occasionally dodge your attacks. There are lots of varied weapons to pick up and you have a katana that can perform gruesome death blows for extra health, Doom 2016 style. But encounters tend to be chaotic and I gave up after two hours because it all felt so unsatisfying. It's a short game but mileage may still vary.