Ruiner review: this indie shooter game is stylish, challenging and a lot of fun

IF YOU want something stylish and uncomplicated to play that is still challenging, this indie retro-futuristic shooter game is perfect.

WITH the avalanche of big-release games out at the moment it’s easy for smaller, independent games to get lost in the crowd.

That’s something of a shame, because there is some great stuff happening on the indie scene — including gems like Ruiner.

Ruiner, developed by Reikon Games and published by Devolver Digital for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, is set in 2091 and casts you as a nameless cyborg with a sweet leather jacket and a quirky digital-display face mask reminiscent of the one worn by Wrench in Watch Dogs 2.

Someone has kidnapped your brother and hacked your brain and is trying to get you to assassinate the head of a megacorporation known as Heaven; a woman known as “Her” has overridden your programming so you can focus on tracking down whoever hijacked you in the first place and kidnapped your brother,

Ruiner absolutely nails the late-80s retro-futuristic cyberpunk theme with laser-sighted precision, expertly recreating a neon-industrial dystopia immediately familiar to fans of Shadowrun, Blade Runner or the synthwave music genre.

Your character fights through waves and waves of enemies in a bloody and frenzied fashion.

From a gameplay perspective, Ruiner is a top-down 3D shooter where your character fights through waves and waves of enemies in a bloody and frenzied fashion — similar to Hotline Miami, which is also from the same publisher.

Your character has quite an arsenal at their disposal, but in true action movie style most guns are discarded when they run out of ammo, requiring you to scavenge more from your dead foes or fall back on your standard-issue weapons.

Enemies outnumber you quite significantly pretty much all the time, so combat requires a combination of reflexes, strategy, and spraying bullets everywhere.

The screen very quickly becomes a technicolour canvas of laser bolts, bullets, blood, fire, explosions, dead bodies and messages from your handler. Did I mention the blood? Things get very messy in the game, which might be something to be aware of if that isn’t your thing.

Ruiner’s music is excellent too, being a pumping electro soundtrack that perfectly fits the setting.

There are dozens of different enemies to fight but they all look pretty samey when you’re spamming bullets everywhere and smacking random goons around with a length of pipe.

Make no mistake, Ruiner is a hard game — and while it’s not Cuphead, you are going to be seeing the “You died, try again” screen a lot. Really quite a lot indeed, actually.

The game certainly isn’t without its challenges.

Fortunately, there’s no limit to how often you can die in Ruiner, and you just restart from the most recent checkpoint — which are well spaced so you’re not having to retrace your steps too much. There’s no shame at all in setting things to “easy” because even the lowest difficulty level still provides quite a challenge.

One thing I noticed was that most challenges could be overcome by trying them with a different strategy — because you can redeploy your skill points on the fly, you might discover diverting them all into shields or health regeneration might give you the edge you need for a particular boss battle or scenario, while another situation might work better with more dash waypoints.

This is not a deep or complex game and after playing it, you’re not likely to find yourself facing an existential crisis or pondering the true meaning of life. And that’s fine — there are times when you want something stylish and uncomplicated to play in short bursts, and Ruiner is perfect for that.

Originally published as Ruiner review: this indie shooter game is stylish, challenging and a lot of fun