Lone Ruin from Cuddle Monster Games and Super Rare Originals is a roguelike action game. Players will venture out into an old magical ruin and combine spells with their abilities to defeat monsters
Is it an enjoyable game and will it keep you entertained for hours and hours like some of the other greats in this genre?
Lone Ruin
After a short introductory cutscene players will be thrust into Lone Ruin’s gameplay without much of a tutorial. You’ll be met by a shady figure who entrusts you with a weapon of your choice and you’re off to it. There isn’t much story here so that’s about it for now.
Monsters will spawn and you’ll have to defeat them before choosing which path you want to explore. Picking which door you go through will affect what loot you obtain so you’ll want to choose wisely based on what’s displayed by the doorway.
Gameplay in Lone Ruin is action packed. Players will have to use either their mouse and keyboard or controller to defeat multiple enemies while avoiding their attacks. The game self-describes itself as a twin-stick shooter but is perfectly playable with a mouse and keyboard thankfully. Firing off your weapon or using your melee attacks is fairly straightforward and Lone Ruin primarily comes down to your reflexes as to whether or not you’ll survive. You’ll have dodge a tonne of projectiles while also trying to avoid running into enemies in latter levels and the difficulty curve kicks it up a notch the deeper you go into the ruins.
Playing into the roguelike formula, no two runs in Lone Ruin will be the same. Enemies and power-ups will vary and you’ll be able to have runs where you will absolutely decimate everything and runs where you’ll end up dying quite early on.
The game’s downfall however lies with the fact that there’s no real narrative or progression here to drive it forward. Other roguelikes like Hades have a story that grips you whereas titles like Dead Cells or Neon Abyss push you further with lots of persistent unlocks, upgrades and boss battles. Lone Ruin lacks this and it feels rather barren or barebones. Even the boss battles aren’t all that challenging once you’ve worked out their attack patterns and how to dodge. There just isn’t enough content here to keep you coming back for more and you’ll be able to breeze through the main roguelike mode once you understand the mechanics of the game.
There’s a Survival mode in the game with 3 different maps to play but these also suffer from the same problems as the main roguelike game mode. Once you’ve gained enough powerups, either through luck or skillfully surviving, you’ll trivialise the game as you just wipe out everything that spawns.
Graphically, Lone Ruin looks pretty enough with chromatic aberration being the theme of the day here. Your attacks look flashy and the game’s eye-catching palette is visually pleasing to look at it if you’re a fan of neon purple and blues. There could have been more enemy variation or additional map content added to really spice things up a bit but that isn’t the case here.
The soundtrack of Lone Ruin is great with some adrenaline pumping tracks though I did encounter a bug where it just stopped playing the music at one point and it never resumed. This made for quite an eerie experience to be quite honest given the sheer number of enemies that were spawning at the time.
Unfortunately, Lone Ruin is a good game that’s plagued with some baffling design decisions. Yes it’s fun as a twin-stick shooter to play but there are other titles in the same genre that truly blow this one out of the water in every aspect. Hades, Dead Cells, Neon Abyss, Enter the Gungeon and more are all priced in the same region and all feature a lot more content and are more polished throughout. Lone Ruin feels like it’s an indie title that needs a lot more work to make it well, work. Only pick this up if you’re starved for a twin-stick shooter to play in short bursts because there’s not much depth to this title sadly.
Lone Ruin Trailer
https://youtu.be/42bxvk4lL5I
Grab Lone Ruin on PC here https://store.steampowered.com/app/1452070/LONE_RUIN/
The game is also on Nintendo Switch which can be purchased here https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Lone-Ruin-2307364.html
For more reviews head here https://invisioncommunity.co.uk/category/review/
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