Rise to Ruins

Rise to Ruins is a fun mix of tower defence, god game, and village/colony sim. The basic premise is you are a God overseeing your villagers and helping them survive against the ever encroaching threat of the corruption. The corruption is the main antagonist, it slowly consumes everything that your influence doesn't reach and sends waves of monsters to destroy your villagers every night. It can't be beaten, it can only be contained and the more constrained it feels, the harder it fights back. (well it can be beaten, but it requires extensive knowledge of the game or cheese that defeats the whole point of playing on anything but peaceful mode) The main gameplay loop is fun and will eat up more of your time than you expect. You build your village, establish industries to support it and develop defences to protect it. The learning curve can seem steep at times and you will most likely fail many times over before you've gotten a solid grasp on the mechanics, but it is a fun and rewarding experience. There is a roguelite progression system that helps with the learning curve and keeps things from getting stale to quickly. You are rewarded xp after every session, success or failure. You can use this xp to open perk chests that give you ever increasing bonuses to almost every aspect of the game. Sometimes you may open one and think "Cool down reduction on a spell I don't use, meh". Other times you will get something that makes you rethink your entire approach in order to make use of it. You also aren't locked to your first region, you can send migrants and supplies to neighbouring regions which you can use to establish a new village and there is enough variety in the different maps to keep it from feeling "samey". Plus, you can always return to an older region/village at anytime without losing progress anywhere else (which can allow for some interesting interaction between your settlements) The difficulty is fully configurable and you can alter pretty much any part of the game's difficulty/mechanics to suit your tastes or create unique challenges (Extreme length winters present more challenges than you would think). The biggest complaint I have is that there isn't a ton of depth or variety, once you've found a strategy that works you won't find yourself forced to change your approach very much, and something that you've safely ignored will most likely stay ignored unless you want to challenge yourself/mix things up. The Dev is still very active, and actually just released a large content update that added several new things (including achievements) and changed the way the faith/influence system works as well. It was a great update that has resulted in me putting another 60+ hours into the game. Overall, even though Rise to Ruins may lack the depth of the various games/genres that inspired it, it blends those different genres successfully to create a unique and fun experience. Seriously, just look at my hours played; that is an absolutely absurd amount of value for the ~$20 CAD I paid for it.

it's kinda boring honestly, the novelty wears out fast and after sinking a reasonable amount of hours into this, only to move to the next region and start again i wish i hadn't bothered. - You spend more time micromanaging crops because your farms and farmers are too ♥♥♥♥ to fend for themselves. (spamming motivate land over the same fields and forests for only 10/50 to grow at a time.) - Crystal feeding the essence stores has been removed so gathering essence to power defences now means a dozen culis gates and a tedious click and drag battle with tanky mobs. The new Prayer buildings are woefully under powered. - AI mapping is terrible so villagers hardly ever attend their duties, lack efficiency or they just straight up run into danger. (Towers drink mana & ammo but production/delivery is slow, rangers run straight into melee and are pretty much useless in a fight and in general, most gathering units path find like ass.) - God powers only work in your own field and are about as practical as throwing confetti at your enemy. Most spells are just plain redundant because they're too weak, detrimental due to AOE, or so specific to target, I cant kill the 20+ 3 pixel high mobs evading or just shrugging off my divine piss sprinkles. (why TF would anyone cast earthquake/meteor/comet, their only half powerful spells, over their own lands?) - And finally resource management, what the hell? You expect me to click several hundred times per resource so i can allocate stock to be made/transported? Nah The game is too slow to progress and can be wiped out in a single night, i don't see the appeal of crushing your players spirits like that, especially with so little to show for it.

Some interesting ideas, but ultimately it never comes close to reaching its potential. A lot of the mechanics feel (or are) half finished and the gameplay loop is deeply unsatisfying once you figure out how the systems work. Aside from being doomed to eventual failure, the game is built around long grinds to unlock upgrades and you spend tens of hours without using a lot of the game's mechanics. The Dev is also MIA and a lot of the early access promises were unrealized. If that weren't the case, I might hesitantly recommend it, but I can't at the moment.

Thought this game was going to be awesome. I had really high hopes for this one. Yet it was another rush to 1.0, with promises of more fixes and content. Then the dev made it seem like they were making it even better. Then, nothing. Pushed to 1.0 and out if early access when it clearly needs to be fully realized. Buy only if you want an unfinished game.

Some recent reviews claim it's "abandoned" when it is actually complete.

I have some mental limitations that makes it where not having a pause button makes this game unplayable for me. Shame, as this genre mix is right up my alley otherwise.

It was great and showed a lot of promise. But no updates for almost 2 years now. Its abandoned.