Regions of Ruin (2018)

RoR starts out nice enough. You build your little village, fight enemies, get loot. Throwing axes from stealth is quite fun. But after a while you're wondering - is this it?

There's not enough variety in weapons and enemies to keep combat interesting. I used the same attack for the entire game (throw 3 axes) because the (two) alternatives were worse. Loot is mostly just a numbers game with a handful of interesting legendary items. Enemies come in a few varieties but none of them require different tactics.

At some point i had finally gathered enough money to buy a mercenary. He obliterated most enemies by himself, with the exception of a powerful hero who was too high-level for me (took me forever to kill him from stealth). At some point i found out you can have multiple of these mercenaries. I thought the limit was 5 at first, it turns out it's 10. Even with just 5 NPCs i barely have time to see the enemy before they're butchered. So much for combat being fun.

The game has tons of other flaws as well. There's a pointless clicker minigame that gives huge rewards so you have to play it. Or rather, you have to let it run in the background while you do something else because it gets automated quickly. Savegames don't list time/date and can't be renamed so good luck remembering which slot (of only 3) you used. Assigning works to gather resources is boring. The storage limit is a pain. It's often unclear what objects you can interact with.

But wait, it gets worse. There's some truly terrible platforming in which you have to jump on platforms that push you off while you're desperately using the unresponsive dash function. You have to sit through terrible puzzles that are so poorly designed that you can't see all the elements involved while at the controls. The worst part is when you get the runeforge. From that moment on you have to go there, manually select every item in your inventory you want to unenchant, then walk back to the blacksmith to turn the disenchanted items into resources. And i put these two buildings far apart and just like in kingdom there's no menu to select a building or even a proper sprint function. Ugh.

I loved Kingdom, the side-scrolling indie game that let you explore the dangerous lands while building your settlement. It pleased me to know that there are other dev teams who take this inspiration and carry on this gameplay concept, as in the recent one being Regions of Ruin.

What they expanded upon here is the character building based on the action RPG mechanics and the expansive world to explore and visit by hundreds of locations. The quests are many to be found and you can send out your workers to gather resources or hire mercenaries to assist you in battle. Due to its extremely addictive nature and closely seamless flow, I've put over 13 hours into this and had a hard time finding a moment where I can quit for the day.

An additional good thing I would like to mention, is the mini-game in the inn building that rewards permanent bonus to your character if you collect enough cards and stick to the game. Being less of a fan of idle/clicker games, this is what I would consider a proper use of it as it gives you a purpose sticking to it in order to improve your main character in the actual game.

Sadly though, the freshness wears off after a while when I've grasped the basics and breeze through the region levels with my over-powered party of companions and finished building the whole settlement. It gets a bit same-y when I have more resources than I can think of spending them for better game progression. I completed the game at the second hardest difficulty level without having visiting the whole map.

Overall, if I were to say how the devs did on sharing the Kingdom torch and expanding on the action RPG/strategy hybrid, they are already onto something solid with their vision and ideas being realized, so far. Keep up the good work, Vox team!