Ruiner tones down difficulty in first post-release update

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Enemies are more fragile and deal less damage.

If you missed last month's release of Ruiner, a stylish top-down shooter, then it's worth reading Omri's review. It's a gorgeous game, and developer Reikon has been working to make it even better by fixing the issues most commonly raised by fans, culminating in an update that tweaks the difficulty and speeds up bullet travel time to make ranged weapons more viable. 

The game has three difficulty modes: Easy, Normal and Hard. The update, launched this week, tones them all down to make the game "smoother and more accurate". Reikon says Easy mode will now allow players to explore the game's back alleys without having to worry about dying horribly. On Normal, enemies deal less damage and on both Normal and Hard they're less bullet sponge-y. 

Bullets from ranged weapons now travel faster, too, "making it easier to hit enemies" and some guns fire in a tighter spread.

If you're worried that Ruiner has lost its rock-hard appeal (as I'm sure some people will be upon reading about the changes), Reikon says you shouldn't be. "The game’s still hard, of course, especially for you, the die-hard fans! But we want to make all types of weapons, especially firearms, more viable." Fair enough.

In a smaller change (but one that Omri flagged up as a problem), stun grenades now consume 50% more energy. Previously, you could just spam them and 'stunlock' groups of enemies, including bosses. 

There's your standard bug fixes, too, all of which you can read about in the full patch notes. 

Ruiner is £14.99/$19.99 on Steam and GOG.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.