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Army of Ruin Review

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Army of Ruin

Awesome Bullet Heaven game that runs fantastic without lags or bugs and which makes it so easy to see all the available challenges in the main menu as well as during a run. Takes around 60h to 100% and has no missable achievements.

Steam

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 60h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: Many, as this is a roguelite
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide, but this is a good guide this is a good guide [/url] to earn a lot of money late in the game
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No, there are achievements for the opposite, stay alive as long as possible on specific levels while not killing the end boss yet
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, but the achievements will tell you this (aka ruin 1 to 5 is how much harder each level is but the reward is higher)
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

As some of you might already know, I LOVE the roguelite genre. Sometimes I feel a bit burned out as I have been playing so many of them, but in other moments I just enjoy them so much. I didn’t feel burned out on the genre while playing Army of Ruin. I think this is because it shows the challenges (and achievements you can go for in a ruin) so clearly. While it also gives you a lot of freedom. I love how you don’t have to combine a specific weapon with a specific passive ability, but that you have to match the elements attached to the passives. This gives you the option between quick a few passives and makes that you can really go for what you want in that specific moment, or gives you the ability to play around with passives you normally don’t choose.

I already touched lightly on it, but Army of Ruin does such a great job telling you which challenges are available. By having a menu in the main menu to show you which ones are available for you right now, where you can filter out those you haven’t got the requirements for (missing a character/skill/weapon etc.). It is also possible to jump into a specific level if that is needed for a challenge. But not only there it shows the challenges, in the menu where you see what you have unlocked, it will tell you with which challenge you unlock the items you don’t have. And if that wasn’t enough, during a run in the pause menu you can also see which challenges are available with your current setup. It does such an awesome job of showing you the challenges without having to memorize the specifics.

What is also great is that you can buy permanent upgrades with gold you earn during runs, but you can decrease and increase those levels without any penalty. So if you need to do a run without getting hit, throw out all of those upgrades that increase health or health recovery and go full offensive for that run.

Furthermore, I also want to highlight how well this game runs. It looks awesome but I also have had no problems with stutters or errors or anything. It was a bug-free experience and with 60h+ of game time, that is very impressive!

The achievements in Army of Ruin are kinda what you expect in a bullet heaven game. There is a big overlap with the challenges in-game, but there are more in-game challenges than achievements. So when you only have a few achievements left, it might be useful to check out which those are and mostly go for those. None of the achievements are missable and most aren’t hard as you could grind to get stronger and stronger. Checking out the gold guide linked above is very useful. I used the character mention in that in many of the late-game challenges as it is such a strong character when used in that specific way.

Publisher:
Milkstone Logo

Developer:
Milkstone Logo

This review for Army of Ruin was written on 4 July 2023, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 221 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.

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