Years on and it's still awful. Goodness knows I've tried putting up with it, but the villagers are dumber than the rocks they won't harvest no matter how hard you throw them at a cliff. I watched them complain about housing while I had six homes waiting to be built, missing logs, while I had over 150 units of the stuff stockpiled and gathering dust, with my builders just wandering around aimlessly.

For ten days.

Sometimes three farms produces enough food for twenty villagers, other times four doesn't produce enough for ten.

Villagers run away at the first sign of enemies, no matter how heavily armed and armored they are, which isn't the most helpful thing ever when they get outnumbered by slimes on day 2.

The AI, such as it is, seems to have two different settings: pretend to work, and gleefully do jack.

"Prepare to lose often!" works with games like Dwarf Fortress, because in DF the game is legitimately difficult. In Rise to Ruin, losing happens because nobody does any freaking work, and slapping a "game hurd tho!" label on it doesn't excuse crap programming.

Give it a chance if you like, but be ready to spend a lot of time waiting for your dozen builders to decide they feel like repairing the damage done to that house a week ago, or boggle as to why your maintenance and repair guy is delivering iron ingots to the toolmaker instead of fixing the sixteen forty damaged buildings you built the damn Maintenance post specifically to get someone to fix the freaking things.

In practice, the game is utterly bloated. You need three or four buildings just to make one operational (magic turret? need an energy collector, which needs to be powered from another building, which needs...), and the workers in those buildings do whatever they feel like, which is usually 'nothing whatsoever'. Got three people working in the lumber mill making wooden boards? Well, that one guy there is bringing logs from the lumber shack to the village center while you've got four buildings waiting for boards. So fun! Not like you need those boards to repel the endless army of weak monsters that will utterly destroy everything in sight while everybody runs away, so you can avoid losing on day 2! LOSING IS FUN, DO YOU GET IT YET?

It could be an amazing game with some actual effort put in, but a Decision(tm) was made a long time ago, when the game changed its name, and it has seemingly been downhill from there. The coding is like the workers themselves: it does whatever it feels like doing, which is usually nothing. I promise this is true: exiting the game and restarting it once caused all the workers to suddenly realise that they had jobs to do, and that game almost went well... for a few minutes. Restarting hasn't worked since; I think the code found the 'Make things go' exploit and patched it out.

I had some fun playing the game but the fun was drained by the problems I had with it. I would describe the feeling more as "draining patience awaiting for the fun to continue".

The game is very difficult even on 1 difficulty lower than recommended.
Sometimes for some inexplicable reason when I entered a level and built farms, the farmers did nothing on the farms(like nothing was planted). I suspect this game has a mechanic where if you don't have carrots to plant you can't plant them(at least from what I observed).
If you pause the game the screen is covered by a dark pause screen so you can't pause and evaluate the situation(you can but you can't look at it).
Things take way too long to get done(especially building better roads), I played at max speed almost all the time.
Game mechanics and design aside, the thing that infuriated me most was the inability to type in a number for production limits or trade limits. If I wanted 50 planks to be in stock always, I would have to click fifty times on the + icon. Is it really so difficult to have an input box where I can type a number?

okay game, pretty fun for a little bit.
Also just TWO updates in FIVE years, no communication at all, dev has abandoned the game once already and personally i will never touch another thing made by this person ever again, if i could i'd probably refund the game

I can't really recommend this game. Even on Traditional (the "more relaxed" aka easiest mode with combat) the difficulty is punishing and cleansing a map is tedious with a single optimal strategy. Which is too bad because it has some nice mechanics and systems.

Basically the way to win is to rush a chain of lights over to where the corruption spawns and encircle it with lights within the first 2-3 game days. Then contain spawns with a couple of bullet towers while you rush town growth to supporting a bunch of crystal golems. Once that's ready slowly light creep into the corruption area until it's all gone.

Enemy strength increases exponentially over time and with corruption size, so containing it ASAP is basically the only way to win. Towers are useless beyond the first few in-game weeks and human military is too hard to replace so there's no real other options on offense either.

This is really too bad because there are fun systems of towers and walls and production and building and magic. Unfortunately none of them matter because you can't fool around if you don't want to eventually be overwhelmed by the corruption's power growth.

I can't imagine peaceful mode is much fun since over half the buildings and systems are useless if there's no combat. Custom difficulty lets you tweak variables that can slow the enemy growth but that only gives you more time to execute the one viable strategy. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a way to make the game more flexible.

always crashes

Big no. Just not worth your time to learn.

The achievement structure in this game is a mess. You have to unlock the achievements via branching paths, like a skill tree. Also, the random chance for the Blood Moon event (damaging meteors rain down all over the map and spawn blood slimes that attack the nearest building) and the Eclipse event (corruption enemies attack your base during the day, just like they do at night) seem glitched as I got 7 blood moons (the harder of the two) before I ever got my first eclipse. And I had to save scum to even get that eclipse to spawn in the first place! After roughly 80 hours of gameplay!

Buy this game for $7.50 or less and get your 5-20 hours of fun out of it then dip. This game is not worth getting 100% on. I'm just stupidly stubborn.

I got hit with back-to-back RNG (Blood Moon/Meteor Shower) which is fine, except that in the aftermath, I couldn't recover from the damage. This is only due to the fact that my villagers simply stopped working and following commands. My farmers stopped watering crops despite having tons of water. My builders also wouldn't stop building something even though I had set the building to lowest priority. My villagers were starving to death and refusing to build the farm which I had set to TOP priority, they chose to build a lumber camp instead.

It's a great concept and I was doing fine with the regular waves and the scaling, but two RNG events, coupled with the villagers who don't work or listen killed all interest I had in playing.

I am generally not interested in colony builders with game mechanics that can't be interacted with when pausing the game. It took me less than a minute to figure out that this game is not for me.

I have some mental limitations that makes it where not having a pause button makes this game unplayable for me. Shame, as this genre mix is right up my alley otherwise.