There are so many games that all attempt to do the same thing: simulate a village of people. Some do it well and others do it egregiously poorly. My personal issue with the concept of village building simulators is that sometimes it feels rather similar to all the other hundred village building sim games out there. However, I feel that when a game called Rimworld came out, nearly every colony sim game was thrown to the wayside with its fantastic usage of simplistic yet informative graphics and the flexibility of having your villagers be farmers, traders, survivors or villager pillagers. I don’t believe I’m saying a controversial statement when I say that Rimworld is a landmark title in the colony sim genre. Pretty much every other title that I have seen has followed this trend where they try to emulate everything that Rimworld does yet doesn’t quite understand why that doesn’t work. Simply copying a game will not increase the popularity of your own.
I am not here to talk about a copycat of the best but a game that saw what Rimworld did and is trying to add a new spin to the gameplay.
Ruinarch, released in early access August 25 of this year on Steam by Maccima Games and published by Squeaky Wheel Studio Inc., tries to simulate what it would be like to destroy a colony.
Ruinarch…tries to simulate what it would be like to destroy a colony.
You are a prospecting overlord that is trying to take over a peaceful realm run by men, elves and other traditional fantasy races. Your objective is rather simple: kill all races smart enough to fight back. To do this, you must understand your powers.
Your influence on the realm is initially weak, and what you can do is rather slim but gradually becomes a true menace to all in the world. The many ways you can win is one of my favorite things in the game. Spells that allow you to simply set things on fire or freeze everyone are rather entertaining. Summon demons and monsters to help you in your many deeds from kidnapping people, to turning into cultists, to invading towns in broad daylight. And last but certainly not least, Afflictions.
Each villager (i.e. targets) in the game has a pool of personality traits that diversify their behavior in the game. They can be things such as persuasion that can convince others to help them in certain activities to alcoholism that causes them to be increasingly irate when they are unable to drink. You can give certain villagers incredible traits that can change the course of the town. There is a trait that causes the villager to turn into a zombie after death as he slowly becomes the bane of the town turning other people into zombies as well. There is lycanthropy that turns the villager into a wolf that obviously cannot communicate with the other villagers and can end up dead before they can turn back because of their instincts as an animal. The most overpowered trait however is psychopathy which causes them to have a ceaseless urge to kill people.
This actually leads to my negative points about the game. One thing is its greatest flaws. It’s way too easy. Because of the many ways you can win in this game, there are way too many ways to cheese the game. Psychopathy is ridiculously easy because all you have to do is trigger that person to kill at night when everyone else is asleep and away he goes slaughtering the whole town without a single problem.
Many damaging spells can be done multiple times in one instant to annihilate someone in a single moment. So many ways to win but only one way to lose. Once they find your portal, which is your entryway into the realm, they will try to destroy it, but it’s so easy to stop them that it’s barely worth mentioning.
All things considered the game is currently in early access and will most likely see many changes throughout its life. I wait to see what is changed and what remains the same once the game is ready for its full release.
Edward Park is a third-year english major with a writings track. EP909767@wcupa.edu