RUINER

Most cyberpunk games want you to look at their world. RUINER wants you to bleed in it.

Polish studio Reikon Games made RUINER, and Devolver Digital published it in September 2017. Devolver is the label behind a long run of stylish, violent indies, and RUINER fits that catalogue closely. Many people will call it a Hotline Miami clone at first glance, but that undersells what Reikon built. This is a twin-stick action shooter set in Rengkok, a decaying city in 2091 that runs on corporate rot and street violence. You play a masked, cybernetically enhanced killer whose mind has been hacked. A mysterious hacker girl talks in your ear and pushes you forward. Your goal is simple: find your kidnapped brother, and go through EarthCorp, the conglomerate that runs the city, to do it.

The market position is clear. RUINER is a premium, focused action game for players who value moment-to-moment skill over size. It doesn’t try to be an RPG, an open world or a live-service platform. You get a campaign of roughly six to eight hours, a free-to-reset skill tree, a small hub district and a run of increasingly tough boss fights. That focus is the pitch, and the design holds to it.

Its influences are obvious. The look invites comparisons to Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the comparison holds. Reikon doesn’t just borrow those references. It rebuilds them around a combat system that punishes hesitation. RUINER is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch for $1.99, and it reads as the work of a studio that knew exactly which game it wanted to make. The open question is whether that game is enough for you.

• Augmentation-driven combat: A quick dash, slow-motion bullet time, a deployable energy shield and an enemy hack that turns foes against each other. These four tools are the core of the game.
• Twin-stick top-down shooting: Movement and aiming are separate. This gives you precise control over positioning during chaotic fights.
• Free-respec karma skill tree: Enemies drop karma, and you spend it on upgrades. You can reset the tree whenever you like, so you can rebuild your loadout between fights.
• Scavenged arsenal: Fallen enemies drop weapons, from pistols and shotguns to plasma rifles and plain metal pipes. You keep improvising as you go.
• Hub district: Between missions you can walk a part of Rengkok that holds NPCs, side jobs and lore.
• Varied level design: Missions move through gangland slums, corporate towers and digital spaces, and they end in demanding boss encounters.
• Multiple difficulty settings: These open the game to players who are less precise, without removing the challenge for those who want it.
• Heavy electronic soundtrack: The industrial and synthwave score drives the pace as much as the level design does.

The Combat Loop

RUINER’s whole argument comes down to one idea: speed is your armor. You aren’t a tank. A few hits will drop you, and enemies swarm hard. The game works because it gives you enough tools to answer that pressure, then forces you to use all of them.

The dash is the most important verb. You can chain dashes along a planned path, which lets you cross a room in a burst, close in on a gunner, and put a pipe through their face before their squad reacts. Bullet time lets you read a messy room and pick your targets. The shield soaks up a volley while your energy recovers. The hack is the smartest of the four. Turning an armored enemy against its own allies thins a crowd and changes the shape of the fight at the same time.

What makes this work is how these systems feed each other. Energy powers your augments, and aggression refills it. So the game pays you for taking risks, not for hanging back. Each encounter turns into a short problem-solving exercise done at full speed. The rhythm becomes: read the room, commit, adapt and clean up. When it clicks, RUINER delivers ten-second bursts of action that few in the genre match.

Weapons and Improvisation

Weapon pickups keep you from settling into a routine. You’ll start a fight holding a shotgun and finish it swinging a pipe because your ammo ran out halfway through. That scarcity is deliberate, and it works. It pulls you into melee range when caution says otherwise, and that is where RUINER’s combat is at its best. Plasma weapons hit hard, but no single gun dominates for long, because the next room will probably take it away from you.

The Skill Tree: Flexibility Done Right

Most action games treat skill points as a permanent commitment. RUINER doesn’t. Free respecs turn karma spending into a tactical choice rather than a life decision. If a boss shreds you with a shield-heavy build, you can rebuild around the dash or the hack and try again. It’s a small design choice with a big effect, because it removes the fear of a “wrong” build and encourages experimenting. More action games should copy it.

Difficulty and Boss Fights

The bosses are where RUINER splits its audience. Several are spectacular: fast, readable pattern fights that test everything the earlier levels taught you. Others bring difficulty spikes that feel more abrupt than earned, with jumps in the curve that read as poor tuning rather than escalation. The lower difficulty settings help. Still, there are moments where the curve jumps instead of climbing, and repeated deaths start to feel like friction rather than learning.

Narrative and the Hub

This is the weakest part of the game, and it’s hard to excuse. RUINER tells its story in a cryptic, fragmented way. You get terse dialogue, flashes of revelation and a lot of implication. Some of that ambiguity is intentional and fits a character whose mind has been hacked. But much of it reads as unfinished rather than mysterious. By the end you’ll understand the plot’s outline without having felt much of it.

The hub district has the same problem. It looks great and suggests a lived-in city, but it’s thin. The side jobs and NPCs add some texture, not real depth. It works as a breather between missions, but it never becomes a reason to spend time in Rengkok outside the next fight.

Pacing and Length

At around six to eight hours, RUINER doesn’t outstay its welcome. In a genre full of padding, that restraint is refreshing. But the short length, combined with the thin hub, means the game’s value rests almost entirely on whether you’ll replay it on higher difficulties. If you will, it’s a solid buy. If you finish games once and move on, the campaign may feel short for the price of admission.

RUINER has a strongly defined visual identity for an indie action game. Its palette is mostly saturated red against dark industrial grime, and that choice does real work. Muzzle flashes, enemy outlines and your own position stay readable even when the screen fills with sparks and bodies. The environments are dense: neon signs, cluttered alleys and cold corporate interiors, all layered with detail that pays off if you stop to look.

The UI stays out of the way during combat, which is the right call for a game this fast. Text-heavy moments, especially in the hub, are less polished. The dialogue presentation feels functional rather than designed.

The soundtrack deserves a section of its own. It’s hard-hitting industrial and synthwave music that pushes the tempo of every fight, and it sets the pace of play as much as any mechanic does.

As a design matter, a top-down action game with a fixed camera doesn’t ask much of a modern GPU, so modest hardware should be fine.

Steam (PC): This is the strongest version. Mouse-and-keyboard aiming gives you a precision edge that matters on higher difficulties, because target selection decides fights. A controller is fully viable, and some players will prefer the analog feel of twin sticks for movement. For a game this fast, frame rate isn’t a luxury, and PC is where the game has the most headroom.

Nintendo Switch: Portability suits RUINER’s short, intense missions well. A boss attempt on a commute is an easy sell. The trade-offs are real, though. The Switch build runs at a lower resolution than PC and gives up frame stability, and both hurt more in a game where your reaction window is measured in frames. Twin-stick play on Joy-Cons works, but the small sticks feel less precise than a Pro Controller or a mouse. If you have a choice and care about performance, pick PC.

RUINER is a game of uneven ambition. Reikon Games put nearly everything into the combat, and that focus shows: the dash, slow-motion, shield and hack form a cohesive action toolkit, and the free-respec skill tree means you’re never locked out of trying something new. The art direction and soundtrack lift every fight above how it would play without them.

Around that core, the game feels thin. The story waves at depth it never reaches, the hub is mostly scenery, and some boss spikes feel like poor tuning rather than real challenge. On Switch, the performance trade-offs take away some of what makes the combat so good.

We rate RUINER a solid, flawed action game: recommend it to players who buy action games for how they feel in their hands and don’t mind a thin story, and steer everyone else toward something with more to hold onto. Steam is the version to get.