Ruined King: A League of Legends Story™

Ruined King is set in the pirate corner of League of Legend's ever changing game world and offers you a nice although a bit randomly picked set of champions from the main game to play with. Visuals are rather low-end but not ugly, voice acting is pretty good, gameplay and story are interesting for about 20 hours. The only problem is, that the game takes closer to 40 hours to play through and there is just not enough meat to justify anything close to that play time. It's mainly the fights that inflate the game's length and which feel very repetitive with only a few exceptions. Usually I would recommend it to LoL-fans for all the lore but knowing that the writers at Riot Games change the backstories of their characters more often than their underpants, everything depicted in this game is probably outdated by now. This leaves Ruined King in a weird place. While it would be a welcome little filler if it was shorter, it really has no business competing with the heavy weights of the genre.

A very good game that just slightly missed the mark on being an amazing and timeless RPG. Though this is mostly going to be a rant about the missed potential regarding the game's choice of characters which,through a League of Legneds lore fan's perspective, is the biggest reason for this game's downfall. I'm not going to touch so much on gameplay and technical aspects however, which are solid and well-polished, so beware. Hence, the small rant: THE CAST IS WEAK. No problem with the individual characters picked specifically, but as a group thrown into the chosen setting for Ruined King, they make a really dull cast. Most interactions boils down, more or less, to: Non-native character: You should really visit (insert their nation here) sometime Native character: 'Aight (Rinse and repeat 10+ times.) They don't really share a significant connection (not that I could see around over half completion, 18hrs+), the non-native characters don't mesh too well with the setting nor the other companions, and nearly all companions overall feel more like ingame mechanics than characters per se (save Braum who's always amazing - we love you, Braum). A setting on Bilgewater and the Shadow Isles had a MASSIVE potential for focus on more underdevelopped characters (eg; Yorick), but this never happens because their coice was to just shoehorn the "popular" ones in, forcing them to fit the story rather than molding a more cohesive story around characters that are *already* present in those areas. It really just felt like a "marketing bait" to get more people into buying and not much else. Alas; this is the only big negative about this experience, but it is big enough to not deserve a 5 star review. All the rest of the game though? Dope.

Title joke aside, this game is very similar to "Battle Chasers: Nightwar" (well, both games were made by the same people), but with some improvements. It is more open-worldly than BC:N (as far as I played, you only move between locations that could be dungeons in other game), "dungeons" are somewhat integrated into the world, battles are turn-based with three-members party with usable skills that can follow three patterns (quick and weak, regular, slow and strong), reworked upgrades (previously you purchased some passive upgrades, like incrased critical chance or defence, now you only get points to directly upgrade your skills). The art style is also similar to BC:N, but IMO it's slightly less comic. It has other things taken from their prevoius game like fishing system, bestiary, two currencies etc. But most important thing is that, it has Ahri and lovely Poros and shoud be enough to buy this game instantly (like I did). But if you aren't fan of those (which is impossible), then you will have a lot of fun playing it, especially if you loved "Battle Chasers: Nightwar".

well the game looks good but it's plagued by two big big problems: - keyboard rebinding is bugged. If you try to assign a key to a direction, it gets assigned to two directions and there's no way to fix it. - When the game loses focus (alt+tab) automatically pauses. This is hugely annoying, since there are A LOT of "dead times". Incredibly annoying.