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Video games 'Ruiner' a joy to play
It’s brutal, bloody, and beautiful and a joy to play — just make sure you want to dedicate the time to getting used to it.
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Shooter genre: Ruiner gives players choices — something that has become increasingly prevalent in video games. (Ruiner/File)
The cyberpunk shooter Ruiner is a challenging but addictive video game.
Basking in glorious ultra-violence, this collaborative production by developer Reikon Games and publisher Devolver Digital focuses on an efficient, unnamed, augmented cyborg and a mysterious hacker as they traverse the aesthetic-heavy world of the fictional Rengkok in a sibling-rescue mission.
It’s not an easy task, and Ruiner’s unrepentant difficulty will frustrate those looking for an easy blast-’em-up. Even as the striking cyberpunk visuals — presented in a beautiful topdown format — make it easier to enjoy the game’s strong nuance (think Blade Runner meets Akira meets Escape from New York), the game play itself will present a sometimes frustrating challenge in its first go-round.
Still, players who are willing to keep at it will eventually land into that addictive spot. This twinstick shooter, where one finger controls the movement and the other controls aim, is beautifully kinetic in its movement.
It doesn’t pull any punches in delivering a strong and stylistic level of violence, and the satisfaction of drowning enemies in waves of bullets is surprisingly endless. The weapons handling has a lot to do with this, with a pleasurable mix of a multibarreled shotgun and a variety of katanas.
Then there’s the surprising slow motion element, which, if done wrong, could have been a cheesy experience. Here though, they add cinematic richness. When the thunderous frenzy of the sprays of bullets occurs, the slow-motion effect triggers and adds an unexpected depth to the action.
It also relates to the need for lightning-fast reflexes for planning your every move. Players must learn to think quicker than they usually do in shooters, as the waves of enemies and conflict come at a breakneck pace.
Narratively, the game tries hard to be something deeper than what it is, but it is far from necessary. The pleasures of Ruiner come from its simplicity: Players walk around, get into an area, brawl with some goons and after winning that fight, move onto the next area.
The array of weapons adds some nice variety, but it’s also the additional abilities that players obtain along the way, including some welcome mind control (“hacking” into an enemy to make them fight each other is particularly enjoyable) and explosives.
Some issues do come from the insanely hectic nature of the shoot-outs, with a blur of enemy bullets and attacks making it practically impossible to tell what exactly is happening. This is of course expected but it also sometimes makes it more than a little frustrating to figure out the best methods of defense and offense.
Ruiner tries to infuse depth by giving the player choices — something that has become increasingly prevalent in video games.
But it rarely feels like these choices make much of a difference, since they are presented in a stylish yet obscure form. This mainly occurs because the mask that covers the protagonist’s face restricts him to simple physical gestures.
That “coolness” wins in the end, and the character does succeed in fitting in with the stylish chilliness of his neon-glowing, steampunk environment, but it means that these supposed forks in the road rarely feel like they matter.
Rengkok itself looks amazing, and the choice of the top-down format is absolutely brilliant, lending a constant sense of that
Blade Runner retro-futurist decaying digital beauty.
The red hue that permeates much of the scenes evokes that sense of mystery and dread, oozing with complete postapocalyptic ambience throughout.
The controls are challenging at first, but get more efficient as players get used to it.
Ruiner — available on Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC — is one of the most pleasurable-looking games to come out in a long while, certainly in the shooter genre. It’s brutal, bloody, and beautiful and a joy to play — just make sure you want to dedicate the time to getting used to it.
