[Review] RuinRaiders - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: OverPowered Team
Published By: Freedom Games
Categories: Roguelite, Strategy
Release Date: 10.14.21

What? You’re telling me you never played a strategy based, roguelite starring animals in power suits before? Well, with RuinRaiders, you finally can!

If that little intro didn’t really explain it, RuinRaiders is a roguelite. In the er…ruins, you wall around freely in randomly placed rooms, most safe and empty, some with treasure, and some with fights! As soon as a fight breaks out, the game switches over to a grid based strategy game. You’re more than often given a few options each turn. Move, shoot, stay on guard, reload, etc… If you have a smaller weapon, you can always move, and then shoot, great when you just need to move close enough. If not, or if you have other plans, you can even move twice. When in danger, this can be a real help. If moving just doesn’t sound good, being on watch lets you just shoot when an enemy goes in your line of sight.

Make sure to hold on to as much Entium as you can. The first time you’re likely to see it’s use is in the begining of a run, which allows you to craft some healing items. You’re going to want these, as RuinRaiders is a pretty hard game. Hard, but forgiving though. As long as your entire party doesn’t perish in fight all together, you’ll be fine. Downed party members will come back after a successful fight. They’ll come back with very little HP, but will come back. This is why having something to heal your party members is vital. At least you can find this addition to more Entium as well as Entium cores in chests.

What do Entium Cores do? Well, they let you add more abilities to each character. Of which every character has their own of. Adding extra ability points to nearby teammates? Having pinpoint accuracy? Having a shield for at least three damage a turn? It’s all good stuff. Until you save up a bunch of Entium however, you’re not going to really get the fullest use of abilities.

You’ll need a large sum of Entium to get ANYWHERE. The buildings that fill the hub menu allow you to upgrade any of those pesky limitations. Want stronger weapons or rarer finds? Gotta upgrade. Want to get more abilities, then you’ll need to make sure you can upgrade to get the level cap for characters raised. This all means, if you’re not incredibly skilled or lucky, there’s going to be a big grind.

I had fun, but RuinRaiders can very much become a bit old if you’re not doing well and are forced to grind. I find it satisfying when you can go deeper and deeper, and those upgrades do smooth out the experience, but this can take a while.

If you like strategy games and roguelites however, this is definitely worth your time. The difficulty is really a given granted the genre, so it shouldn’t bother players. The game even gives you a nice heads up.