Well, that didn’t take long, did it? Five months or so after the release of the Kickstarter Hyper Light Drifter, we get Ruin of the Reckless, a totally unrelated game. Totally unrelated in this case of course meaning almost exactly the same.
Every aspect of Faux-Operative’s game is nearly identical to Hyper Light Drifter. It’s a 2D roguelike with an emphasis on combat. It has similarly stylized sprite art, the same top down camera, it even juliennes fries. But, hey, lots of games have taken heavy inspirations from other, popular games in the past, so let’s not be too hard on Ruin of Drifter.
The story’s different. Here you’ll be fighting your way up a mystical tower that’s always been there. It’s said that whoever reaches the top will be granted one wish to do with as they please. You’ll play as a guy named Stargrove who apparently wants revenge for something after waking up in front of the tower after sneaking out of his village to follow some other guys on horses… yeah, the story isn’t explained very well. Add that to the list of similarities to Hyper Light Drifter.
As the developers describe it, gameplay focused on “fast-paced melee combat, speedy movement, and co-operative play.” It’s also a roguelike, so you can expect to die a lot. They say there’s an emphasis on melee combat. All the gameplay shown so far has the character using magic spells though.
Levels will also be randomly generated. If you remember, that was originally the case with Hyper Light Drifter as well. Luckily you’ll be able to speed through areas at a lightning pace. You can be the one to judge what’s so lucky about that, but Faux-Operative is very keen on that detail.
If it sounds like I’m not very keen on Hyper Light Reckless, it’s because I’m not. It’s one thing for a game to be inspired by another. It’s something else entirely for a game to use every single one of somebody else’s ideas. It all looks competent, borderline interesting, sure; but that’s because they’re so heavily using Hyper Light Drifter as a template.
None of that matters though. At time of writing, the project has already hit its funding goal. If you haven’t had your fill of 2D rogueliking with great art, by all means, considering throwing some bucks at Ruin of Reckless. The Kickstarter page is bursting with information, screenshots and plenty of gameplay. While the $10,000 goal seems a bit low, they didn’t have any trouble blowing past it.
Ruin of Reckless could be a fine game. Let’s just not forget there are some great looking Kickstarter campaigns that are trying a lot of new things. They could use some attention as well.
This game must have the craziest, most excessive amount of screen shake I’ve ever seen. Never mind the Hyper Light Drifter similarities, I’m already dreading the thought of playing with the image convulsing in all directions xD
Hey Georgi! Thanks for the comment. We have heard that feedback more than once. A lot of that footage was captured earlier in development, and screen shake has been significantly reduced since then. Additionally, players will be able to manually adjust Screenshake to their liking in the full version.
As far as the rest of the article, I don’t have much to say… except that I highly recommend checking out one of the many archived Ruin of the Reckless streams on Twitch.tv and seeing for yourself whether our game plays similarly to Hyper Light Drifter or not. In my opinion, besides visual style, they have almost nothing in common.
I have yet to play hyper light drifter… Sortve eating for the vita port. I don’t have as much time to console game seeing so the vita is my console away from home.