Rise to Ruins

The game has so much potential and can be addicting, but the annoyances add up to offset alot of that from pure frustration. The only really viable way to make a defence is a maze, since A. even the strongest walls have only 400~ HP, B. The wall building AI are morons and will fail to build a multiple layer wall in one go, or build a single wall and end up outside the village, and even then take a year to build anything, C. This assumes the villagers aren't burning alive from fire despite spamming ice spells, fountains and wells to offset the summer heat, D. Even if you have perfectly functional villagers, they will walk through a fence when near an enemy, letting them in, even if you disabled said gate. Losing a town to this is awful. Also golems you summon will just walk off away from the front lines instead of dealing with the 15 headless outside. E. You have limited ammo meanwhile the enemy just spams non stop. The game has potential and in the first few days is super fun, but after that it's just painful.

Необычная смесь градостроительного сима с tower defence. Очень залипательная штука, но порог вхождения довольно высок. Проигрывать (если не выбран легкий уровень сложности) придется часто. За 182 часа я так и не построил стабильную деревню, ко второй зиме оборону прорывают :) Однако, за счет понимания механик и мета-прогрессии следующая попытка идет уже лучше, этим игровой цикл и затягивает. Мне кажется, вайб чем-то схож на rimworld, но без сюжетной глубины. Самое то, если хочется поиграть партию вечер-два, проиграть, отдохнуть и вернуться снова.

Rise to Ruins – The Game Where Your Village Survives (Mostly) Because of You 🏰✨ If you've ever wanted to play god over a village full of adorably doomed people, Rise to Ruins is calling your name! 😂🌄 By day, you're the benevolent overseer, building up your little slice of paradise, managing resources, and keeping the villagers happy. By night? Well, you're desperately throwing up walls and praying those defenses hold against hordes of terrifying creatures that think your village looks like a buffet. 🍽️ What makes Rise to Ruins such a gem is the blend of tower defense with a god game. You’re not just micromanaging; you’re actively guiding, protecting, and occasionally (or frequently) resurrecting your villagers. It's brutal, funny, and, yes, sometimes even heartwarming. It’s challenging, quirky, and has that "just one more night" feeling down to a science. Honestly, if you enjoy games like Black & White or RimWorld, you're in for a treat with this one. Embrace your inner god (or disaster manager) and see if your village can truly rise to ruins! 🏡🔥 Created with <3

Good game sadly abandoned Original Review: This game is brutal, its hard, and merciless. The goal is to fail, but it is rewarding to see just how far one can get before doom. I think this game has a lot of potential. However the slow pace of the development might just be what will kill it. I think this game could spark up once again if some effort was put on Performance and mods. Create a high performant base, and let the community spark up some alternative gamemodes, buildings and maybe even entire game systems. As the game is now it is recommendable. But only to a very niece type of people who enjoys these types of games (Rimworld players) or other brutal sims. The game is enjoyable to pick up once a year for a week then let it cook some more, while playing other titles. For 13,99 euro, this is a steal and the idea of a 1 usd/euro an hour is quickly reached here.

This game is an absolute joy to play in many ways, and it is a steal at $40. Thankfully, the cost of the game is half that. Starting out, I would suggest the traditional mode, then experiment to see what works. Currently I am at 14 hrs, but I can see myself playing this for at least 100 more. This game is well realized and overflowing with potential. I would love to see this become a series of games, and would gladly pay more for sequels with additions to the gameplay (such as storymode, increased rpg/tower mechanics, increased progression, faction-based clans, further progression of the horde, etc.), or with more consequence threading like in dwarf fortress.

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_.

The underlying game is quite good, but I find its very faffy in a few ways which could probably be fixed or improved in some way in the future, or maybe I am just an idiot. To give a few examples: - When you start off there is a lot to take in, and some buildings say they need another building, but you need to manually go find the building in the various menus and build it, it would be handy if you could click something on the building with the requirement that would automatically bring up the menu to build the other building. - Your range/influence can be cut off by walls, but this can cause some problems when you are trying to create defenses as you may want to wall off one of your towers with a gate to allow access, but if this is near other walls it often just wont build as it says its out of range as the walls have somehow cut off your ability to build there, even if your villagers can access there and you have a great deal more range outside of the walls. - Some mechanics are not entirely clear straight off like you may wonder why you are not getting water even though you have built a water purifier near water, but turns out you need to HARVEST water, and nothing really indicated that on the water buildings. - its unclear how you push back corruption, turns out you just need to build towards it and your buildings push it back. Anyway overall its a good game but every hour or so I will find something annoying and then have to work around it or do something silly to try and achieve what I want, which is why I left this review as its a good game but marred with oddities that just get in the way of having fun at some points.