Rise to Ruins

C'est laid, carte peu lisible , c'est compliqué (très très), interface hideuse, des dizaines de menus, pas de pause active, ... Jeu pour ingénieurs, je passe mon tour.

If you love rouge-likes and Dwarf Fortress, this game is up your alley, however I have some caveats and some things I love (I'll start with the caveats). The Caveats: 1. The UI is extremely small and cloistered with no way to pause and examine things if you're eyes aren't great or to enlarge text if you need it. On top of that, when mobs are in your town it's almost impossible to select them or sometimes even see them amongst all the other things around them including the buildings that are being attacked or the resources they contain (mainly when trying to pick up and move the mob to a less destructive location). When trying to defend my town there's been times where I have to either sit back and watch the destruction because I can't intervene, hoping that it isn't too severe, or just destroy my save and start from scratch because there's no way to recover after a certain amount of setback. 2. The help text and general information surrounding what different game elements and mechanics behave is not robust. It's hard to know what choices to make for defending your territory when it comes to tower upgrades or walls. The wall help text says that it won't be attacked unless mobs have no other way around, but I've routinely had monsters destroy parts of my tower maze walls even with three tile paths perfectly open but a longer path. I love the idea of building a tower defense type pathing structure, but if the walls are vulnerable in an unpredictable way, it isn't a viable path to building. 3. Lastly, the different resistance types for monsters requires you to build a lot of different tower types despite having a fairly low building count ceiling that requires a lot other resources that require other buildings. It's hard to have the perfect mix of towers when you need a lot of support structures and citizens while also trying to build out lighting structures to keep the corruption at bay. It feels to me like threading a needle every time with very little room for improvisation or creativity in terms of what I build, when I build it, and if I built it effectively enough. I've had some games where I can already see that I'm not going to make it even though it's only 5 or 6 days in. It would be nice to have some flexibility in terms of how to get to a successful, defensible build without having to rush the initial building and resource gathering. The Things I Love: 1. Things ain't easy. Again, like Dwarf Fortress, you get no help if you mess up, but once you learn some of the meta you can make it happen. The balance isn't perfect, such as how much the corruption ramps up when you finally manage to get it to a point where it should be eliminated, but it will put up a fight which I actually appreciate. I want a challenge and not some predictable meta where you just follow some wiki and always win. 2. Getting your essence level up feels incredible and really helps you out, but it takes the right amount of time, Sure, you're a god, and yo've got powers, but you've got to make sure that your faith level is raising or you've got nothing. It's fun trying to raise the essence storage level, and once you do it's smooth sailing for a while but it's never a breaking game mechanic. In fact, if you rely on it too much you'll ruin your chances to survive the later stages of the pressed for space corruption. 3. I'd love a few more storage spaces, or storage spaces that can hold more (or maybe a building that can create crates and barrels to help store more things) but over all I love the mix of clearly important buildings (harvesting, housing, food, defense) with minutiae (trash collecting, dog houses, rangers, lightning rods, magic stuff). It's got a great balance between stopping monsters from attacking and managing a town. 4. I like the blood moon and the trashy slime elements. It's just nice to know that no matter how much you handle the obvious enemy—the corruption—you're never safe. You're _never safe_. Anyway, I wish the game didn't make me feel so rushed to immediately strike out space wise against the corruption and I wish I had more UI clarity so I can see what is happening and react to it. Additionally, besides the text size and information help, controlling time a bit to slow it down or speed it up would be super helpful. I think being able to drop time down to half and quarter time as well as being able to pause the game and interact with the game would be a huge win with a small amount of change. I love this game! I'll keep playing it even if I just rage quite it before I wrote this. It has a lot of heart and it's well put together, I highly suggest it, but don't come in here expecting a walk in the park. It's meant to be a bit complex and challenging. As we've learned in Dwarf Fortress: "Losing is fun!" so be prepared to suffer, hate it, love it, and then find yourself jumping back in because you _refuse to leave it like that_.