Heroes of Ruin (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Heroes of Ruin was released in June of 2012 - not a great time to release a dungeon crawler, due to Diablo III being shipped out a few weeks before - but, lo and behold, n-Space and Square Enix put it out there and many 3DS owners were just itching to get their hands on it.

The game takes place in the fictional city known as Nexus, in which players must find a cure for Ataraxis, ruler of the city and like many RPGs out there, it's possible to choose from a variety of different characters, all of which possess their own unique skills and actions. Each character has their own skill tree and players can choose whether they want to play through the game's story alone or with friends.

Sounds great so far, right? Well, sure it has online co-op, four different characters and a bunch of different skills, but it lacks something that most RPGs possess - that is the ability to face bosses after killing them for the first time. This just throws the replay nature of the game out of the window, as a new character has to be created in order to fight a certain boss again, and even then players must go through the various dungeons in order to reach that boss.

There are a few things that Heroes of Ruin does right, such as the randomly generated dungeon layouts and random loot drops, but other than that, the title just seems like a generic RPG that lacks character. When the game was in the development stages, n-Space touted the daily challenges, but almost a year after the game's release, these challenges have been nothing more than killing a certain amount of a specific enemy or clearing a certain dungeon. Not to mention that players may need to complete these challenges more than once, because sometimes the game forgets that the challenges have been completed!

Heroes of Ruin is definitely an ambitious title and n-Space cannot be faulted for that, it's just a shame that this ambition goes to waste due to bad design choices and annoying glitches, such as daily challenges not registering as completed.