The more games I play, the more I realize most professional titles don’t care about level design. To think there’s entire generations who won’t know what level design is; no wonder people think “constantly introducing new gimmicks=good.” It’s all they know.

• RUINER
  

  5 hours playtime

  9 of 33 achievements

This is a twinstick shooter. Move with left stick, aim with right stick, shoot with right trigger, melee attack with right bumper, dash with left bumper, and as you progress, you can choose various upgrades that are activated with the other buttons.

From the beginning, it’s clear the game doesn’t really have any level design: just empty halls connecting enemy arenas, where waves of enemies come at you. There was this one arena where the walls were hazards and would reflect your bullets (potentially back at you), but it was just one arena, one more gimmick thrown away before it could reach its potential; all the other arenas were interchangeable.

That’s not to say the halls were completely devoid of anything besides the occasional chest or weapon: in the second level, there are automated turrets that will shoot at you from off-screen with barely any warning and take 3/4ths of your health before letting you pass. In the final level, there are places outside enemy arenas were melee enemies will continually spawn while you need to look for red targets you need to shoot within the red level you’re in that will unlock the way forward. Beyond that, though, there isn’t much here.

Also, despite there being almost no variety with the arenas, the enemies don’t have much variety, either: most either chase you with a short-range attack or sidestep/side-dash while shooting at you (with the only real variation here being what type of gun they’re using). Sure, the game has stationary drones that send out pulses which lower either your health or item energy (depending on the symbol on them), but they don’t show up until the latter half of the game and are still fairly uncommon.

Also, after literally each and every set of enemy waves, the screen flashes to remind you what your objective is (despite levels being very linear), and it’s just as annoying as it sounds.

The bosses and mini-bosses are fine, but the game makes you fight the same mini-bosses multiple times, and as you might be able to imagine, it’s just as repetitive as the regular enemy waves because there’s neither variation with level design or AI, and I swear the game makes you fight the cyborg no less than six times, three of which are part of a really, really absurdly long set of enemy waves after the final boss! Yup, the game just couldn’t end on a decent note, so it instead sends 60 cannon fodder enemies at you and three copy-paste cyborgs before rolling the credits. I was wondering if it was supposed to be a “supposed to lose” segment around half-way through because of just how long and repetitive it was, but no: it’s just really long and repetitive.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. It’s similar to Cat Quest in that the mechanics are fine, but the combat is really repetitive. Wait for a good sale if you’re interested.