Heroes Of Ruin

This game started off pretty well, and for the first five or six hours I couldn't understand why so many reviews painted the game in such a poor light...

...then I maxed out my inventory. You can only really carry 34 pieces of loot, which becomes incredibly problematic when you consider the extraordinary amount of loot to be had. Not too big of a deal - you can easily identify better pieces of loot in your inventory and sell the rest. This quickly leads to the second problem, though - since so much loot is dropped "in the wild," buying equipment from the vendors is rarely, if ever, necessary, and you quickly hit the 99,999 gold limit, at which point you can no longer sell loot or pick up gold dropped by monsters. To further compound the issue, the game allows you to have four characters saved - but you can't share loot between them, so all of the unique Gunslinger items you find while playing your Vindicator just get left right there in the dungeon to despawn, because you don't have enough room to carry them, have too much gold to sell them, and can't move them to your Gunslinger character where you could use them.

I'm not even half way through the game yet, and I've gone from thoroughly enjoying every minute of dungeon exploration to simply rushing to complete quest goals and wondering when I'll hit the level cap.

While the game-play is good fun, the game makes it extremely clear that you're there to gather loot, so the brokenness of the loot mechanic strips the game of its very core. The multiplayer component is good enough to imbue the game with some staying power, but unless n-Space and company can come up with a patch to provide for some on-going loot storage, and inter-character loot sharing, this cart will quickly become relegated to the shelf.

Heroes of Ruin is a new dungeon crawling game for the 3DS. It doesn't really differentiate itself from other dungeon crawlers and can get repetitive, but it is simple and very fun in short bursts.

What did I like? I personally found it easy to pick-up-and-play; the controls are actually very basic and not hard to master at all. At the beginning of the game you get to chose a class (out of 4), and although there isn't much customization, I think it's enough. I chose the Savage which is a big beast that is heavy on melee attacks. Your normal attack is performed with the B-button, and you can dodge and block with the R-button. The rest of the buttons are used for your special attacks, like a chain attack that drags an enemy towards you (like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat). I genuinely appreciate a simple-to-pick-up game, especially for a handheld. I also like the fact that the dungeons are generated randomly. If I decide to play through it again, at least it will feel a little different. It also has a decent amount of quest-per-dungeon (one complaint for this below, though). There is a cool feature that (I think) most dungeon crawler fans will enjoy, and that's the ability to sell loot immediately from the dungeon, with no need to travel back to the hub world. I also enjoy the graphics, specifically the environments (another complaint below.) Nexus, the hub world, was easy to navigate. The 3D was actually decent, but I don't see myself using it often. I am a fan of exploring in games and this has plenty of it. Also, the RPG elements like leveling up are easy to understand, another big plus.

What did I dislike? It doesn't really differentiate itself from other dungeon crawlers and can get repetitive, which is the biggest issue for me; most of the time will be spent looting and button-smashing. The side-quest aren't really deep and are repetitive. So far, most of the side quest are fetch-quest, like go get some wood then bring it back. Also, although the environments are great, the character models were often bland and blocky. The gameplay can get a bit sluggish as well. Maybe it was because I was playing as a Savage, but the character runs slow.

Overall, if you're looking for a dungeon crawler or a simple-to-play game, I highly recommend Heroes of Ruin. It's probably best to play this in short burst so it doesn't get too repetitive. Also, you can receive daily challenges for this game which should add more game time. I purchased it from Amazon when it was $30 and I have enjoyed most of it so far. I will update this review when I finish the whole game, and let you know how long the game is.

*I cannot comment on the online play since I haven't played it online.

I just got this game and can tell you that I like it so far. I first tried the online game which is a co-op, but found the other players to be treasure hogs and not looking out for you. That's not a co-op, that's just the game with other players getting in the way of your achivement. So then I tred the solo game and found it to be fun and adventurous. Every break that I get, I'm spending playing this game. It plays like any dungeon crawler, but you can choose take on other tasks while you go along or ignore them and go straight for the goal. The game also has many puzzles in each level you have to solve before you can move on to the next part of the level. My only complaint about the solo missions so far is that there isn't an auto-pause feature. If you are playing at school/work on your free time and simply close the 3ds, it goes into sleep mode, but when you open it back up it isn't on pause. So if you forget that you were in the middle of a battle, you could die before you get your bearings.

I noticed that many of the bad complaints for this game has to do with the money and equipment caps. I don't care much for this, to me it doesn't take away from game play. I just collect the items that make my character stronger and ignore the rest, then I look at the stats of each piece of equipment, pick what makes my character stronger, and sell or dump the rest. But if you are looking at money and equipment as a status quo or a way to keep score, then I could see this being a problem. But to me, money only needed in emergencies when you are running out of potions, and equipment can be easily made obselete by better equipment.

Other then that, I find this game to be the 2nd best 3ds game in my collection (Zelda OoT being the first) and am looking forward to playing it.