Geekscape Games Reviews ‘Heroes of Ruin’
Heroes of Ruin seems great when you skim the surface. A dungeon crawling, loot based game that’s portable with actual controls instead of using your fingers to manipulate a virtual D-Pad or buttons is perfect. Almost too perfect. As with most of the games that fall into this category, the addiction is hard to deny. Searching every corner of the current dungeon you’re in looking for that one piece of loot that will make the difference in some of your stats is more important than the actual battles in these cavernous mazes.
Loot seemed to be the only thing keeping me going though. With a story that is too generic, Heroes of Ruin fails to stand out in the crowd of typical fantasy stories. Trying to find the lost relic that will revive the king in the land of “insert name here” while trying to figure out who is trying to deceive you in order to wield that power has been seen all too often and recently with games such as Diablo 3. Since games that fall into the loot finding category are never about the story, I can’t fault Heroes of Ruin too much on that respect.
I was enamored by every piece of loot I found even if it wasn’t something my Gunslinger could use. n-Space was smart enough to incorporate an easy way to sell items in your inventory, at a lower cost than selling at a vendor in town. Considering that you can only hold 34 items, which include the ones equipped in your inventory, you will be using this feature a lot. Near the last quarter of Heroes of Ruin, selling loot found in the dungeons won’t be an option due to your gold capping out at 99,999. This makes searching for loot, what makes games of this caliber fun to play, a painstaking task. Hovering over every piece of loot to find something you can use that is better than what you have equipped becomes tedious. Considering you would be better off just spending all your gold at the character specific vendors in town for gear, such tasks seems worthless.
Playing as the Gunslinger, everything felt a little too easy. A perk in one of the three skill trees lets the gunner have a good chance to knock back enemies with each shot as well as damage enemies close to each other. As soon as I heard a any noise at all, I would let loose with my pistols and let the auto-aim do its thing. I tried playing as a Vindicator class, think paladin in World of Warcraft, and combat was still easy but I had to adjust my tactics a bit and use more abilities than the Gunslinger. The only trouble I ended up in while playing Heroes of Ruin was getting stuck in attacking animations. Not being able to quickly react to anything is something developers have to get in their head as being a bad thing. Yes, your animations for the character models are pretty but having me locked into said animation is not doing the player any favors.
Multiplayer seems to work for the most part. In the time that I played for the review, I ran into very little lag and finding games was actually easy. I tried using the mic to talk to others that where in the game with me but it seems that people have the option to use voice chat turned off. Either that, or they didn’t understand how to turn it on in the options menu. The one thing that actually made my online experience with strangers horrible in Heroes of Ruin was the way loot was setup for online play. I would barely get any of the loot since the people I was playing with would just take it as soon as it dropped, even if they didn’t need it. Even though the best loot is usually at the vendors in town, it’s still annoying to have people join your game, steal all the loot and then quit. The separate loot system is the one thing Blizzard got right with Diablo 3.
Diablo 3 is wearing thin and Torchlight 2 is nowhere in sight. What’s a gamer to do while waiting for Runic to toss a bone our way? Heroes of Ruin may seem like the answer but ends up being nothing more than a temporary fix for the dungeon crawling loot junkies.
