Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages

It says fast paced, but the opening stage is so painfully slow I couldn't stand it. Just as I was getting to the exit, the exit moved to the opposite side of the map. I'm done.

game music is peak BUT
you cant buy them here
youtube doesnt have them

you can listen and buy them here
https://ecdryere.bandcamp.com/album/ring-runner-soundtrack
you are welcome :)

I knew this was my type of game when I had to "sell" Dvorak keyboards to a school and ended up in a Deathmatch with the PTA forcing them to make peace with their clerically-handicapped children. (This was after I enshrined a flail without the help of the 'Artisanal Space-Flail Shrine Builders').

Top-down space shooter with lots of depth and an epic soundtrack, even at full price of a large sum of £3.99 it's worth it.

Read more of my short essays on video games at strategineer.com

Nowadays, I lower my expectations as low as they can possibly go before playing a new video game. Maybe I've been disappointed one too many times or maybe I'm a pessimist to the core. Either way, because I set the bar so low, when an amazing game falls into my lap, it gives me energy.

In the short time I've spent with it, I've fallen in love with Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages. It's a real tragedy that you probably haven't heard about it.

So, what is Ring Runner?

Ring Runner is exactly what it wants to be. It feels like a game that belongs to another time. A bygone era, when games were made by a small number of passionate people who had an unfulfilled desire to make great games and share them with the world.

Ring Runner is a top down action RPG space shooter game. If you've ever played the Asteroids arcade game or SPAZ then you'll know what it feels like to move your ship around. When you fire your ship's thrusters, it starts moving in a direction and keeps moving in that direction because… You're in space. It's really easy to get into but mastering your ship's movement, abilities and weapons requires skill and experience.

When I say "your ship", I really mean it. What makes Ring Runner interesting is the unadulterated depth of its ship customization system. You pick a ship, which determines the specialist equipment you have access to as well as the size and number of common equipment slots, think shields, engines, stealth, etc. and then you choose which equipment to slap onto your ship out of the hundreds available to you. Using this system, you can build ships that handle completely differently from one and another and excel at different tasks.

I LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE for this. I love building decks in card games. I love theory crafting about builds in action RPGs. I love challenging strategy games that force me to evaluate all my options carefully.

The video game medium is interesting because it's an interactive medium. So, my favorite games tend to be ones where the choices I make matter and influence the experience I'm having in a meaningful way. That can mean different things for different games.

Ring Runner is great because it encourages you to express yourself and find creative solutions through its deep ship customization system combined with the many open-ended challenges it thrusts you into.

For one mission, you can build a quick and agile ship with heat generating weapons used for disabling then destroying enemy ships. For another, you can make a big but slow missile boat relying on a small fleet of support drones to stay alive and dish out a ton of damage. Or maybe, you can design a cloaking ship that waits for just the right moment to pull enemies into its trap and blow them all up with area of effect weapons.

Ring Runner makes you feel like a science fiction super space scientist. Your lab is the hangar where your vast array of ships sit; waiting for you to tinker with them and bring them to life. The missions you go on are your Petri dishes where you pilot your ships and see how they fare in "real" space combat. After each mission, whether you've succeeded or failed miserably, you feel compelled to go back to your lab and tinker with your ships some more in hopes of making them more effective for your next mission.

All of Ring Runner's underlying game mechanics are tractor beaming you straight onto the path of having fun building ships and mastering the art of piloting them.

The game has a thirty hour long single-player campaign featuring a variety of different missions (It's got multiplayer too but I haven't been able to try it yet).

Ring Runner rewards you for engaging with its ship building system deeply by giving you extra resources when you tackle a mission's optional objectives and the game's higher difficulty levels. This allows you to purchase more ships and equipment which then feeds back into the core gameplay loop of piloting ships, tinkering with ships, piloting ships some more and so on and so forth.

Ring Runner makes you feel powerful and makes you feel as though that power was earned through hours spent toiling in the lab. But, even the smallest and most inconsequential choices in the game feel empowering.

I like being given the choice to assign a particular weapon or ability to a specific button in a video game. Assigning my quick-firing laser weapons to the Square button on my PS4 controller feels right for most of the ships I build, but I like being able to make that choice.

This is a small example of the vision that permeates all of Ring Runner's design. The game lets you decide how you want to play it but keeps you on your toes by asking you questions in the form of various challenges and forcing you to come up with answers through your ever-growing library of ship designs and constantly improving piloting skills.

Ring Runner is really something else and I hope I've been able to convince you to check it out for yourself. If you're interested in trying out the multiplayer side of Ring Runner, even better. Building sets of ships with friends to tackle the tough multiplayer cooperative challenges sounds like a lot of fun. Or seeing who can build the "best" ships in the arena mode or the DOTA-esque mode sounds like a blast too.

Until next time, I'll be here. Eternally toiling away in my lab in my quest to achieve ring running perfection.

This is more than I hoped for

The game is the best and most frenetic 2D space fighting game I have ever played. The magic that brings out this quality is the complex environment and customizability that drives these fights.
There are a lot of Hulls and tons of Accessories and Weapons you can equip your spaceship with. Every hull has its slots and its CLASS.

The game gains a new meaning with these classes. You can build a Warrior ship, or an Archer ship, or a Mage ship, or a Rouge ship, or more. Every one of these fantasy "Archetypes" has its own mechanics, its own equipment and you can equip different combinations and even merge different classes in your ship.

The result can be a burning warrior ship that heroically charges, overheats, stuns, throws around and hammers any enemy that gets close enough, or a mage ship that manipulates and explodes areas from afar, or a rogue ship that confuses with fancy decoy shows and backstabs the observers with precise missiles.

Its campaign is long but everything in it is an excuse to start fights.
The story is ok, with some funny writing, some confusing writing and some weak writing that is just there to show your objectives.
The music is pretty good but gets repeated too often. It has like 10 tracks for 100 levels.

At the time of this review, the game costs 5 euros and i can say it deserves even more, because its massive amount of content and attention to details shows it was made with love.

It is a shame we probably won't see a continuation of this kind of game in the immediate future

P.S: Beware the menus: they are really ugly and confusing

I have some mixed feelings here. This has some fun moments and the dialogue ranges from funny to tedious and ridiculous. The graphics are simple, but actually fairly nice given the cost. The controls are a mess. I do not have a gamepad, but a mouse and keyboard suck. You map specific keys to use in the main menu, and then you can swap around between those for your ship. Stranger than it sounds. Some key mapping that works for a ship with many manuever abilities may not work for the kind with 6 different kinds of missile launchers or cooldown attacks. The interface is awful, menu or battle. Your mouse moves to a new place when you click something and viewing abilities or stats is tedious. Your main stats (shields, heat, etc..) cling to both edges of the screen, so eye movement is all over the place during battle.

Ship building is extensive yet unrewarding. You can generally only have 1 of any given weapon or upgrade. This means you cant specialize with all of one type of weapon. This means that most ship configurations have far more weapons and keys to use than necessary. Some ships with 4 regular launchers, a heavy assault, and a pivot/fixed gun would end up meaning a minimum of 6 keys to use for attack, not including all the other abilities. When configuring your ship, items that you no longer have a slot for will not show up as an option. This makes comparing stats (like shield types) difficult.

Unless you plan on playing the 'arcade' for hours and hours on end, you just might have all the items/ships unlocked, but not even half enough money to buy them all.

This was fun, and I did get my moneys worth out of it. I would consider buying from this publisher again. But that is not the same as recommending it. Just because I could power through it does not mean my friends would.

This game was recommended to me and I decided to give it a shot despite it seeming like a bit of a bland upgrade to the old school strafe-and-shoot asteroid game genre. My inital prognosis of this game couldn't have been more off the mark.

First of all, I don't review many games, but this one really had the perfect trifecta of what any game (regardless of genre) needs in my opinion. The story alone would've earned a recommendation from me (you actually get a novel version of the story with your purchase of the game). The soundtrack, which is fantastic, is an ever-present boon to the gameplay without being overbearing at any point. Now, hearing all this, one might think that the story and music would drown out any amount of fun to be found in the gameplay itself (which essentially is you piloting your ship of choice to reach the goal of the given mission). This fortunately isn't the case and I believe the reason for this is due in prt to the high amount of customization one can employ in building their vessel. There are hull types, with each hull type being predisposed to excel in certain fields. The customization further continues with allowing you to pick and swap a whole contingent of ship systems including various types of fixed cannon weapons, projectile weapons bays, engines, heatsinks, shield systems, armor plating types, utility drives that allow for special abilties, and a whole slew of aoe abilities that are both effective and visually appealing.

In an effort to not give too much of the story away, this is a fantastic game for it's cost ($5 at my time of purchase) and it is a game I'm actively buying copies of for my friends because I simply want them to share in this quirky yet thought-provoking story of truth-seeking and peanut butter cup consumption. 10/10

I don't usually like this type of gameplay, but with the ridiculously low price and awesome reviews I gave the demo a try...and fell in love with the writing. It's so humorous and the world it builds is great. I might be running into walls and doing a terrible job at piloting, but I'm enjoying every minute of it.

If you like sci-fi, this game is an absolute gem.
The attention to detail is maniacal, the storytelling and humour are so great that can be compared to legendary games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.
The gameplay and the progression are perfect, those guys (and the gal) are game design masters; I'm at 18 hours and the quality is constant,
there is so much passion here that I'm speechless, no wonder it took 5 years of development.

I got this game in 2014, played 2 hours and then went to Linux single boot.
Those 2 hours alone left a sign in my memory.
Few days ago I tried to run it on Linux thru Wine, after messing with the components and the engine versions I was able to get it to work at 100%
so if you are a Tuxer like me, check WineHQ and you'll find my instructions, let me know if you need help.

The fact that this game has gone overlooked for so long is simply criminal. I recently did a second playthrough of this game, just to see if it held up as well as I remembered it the first time, and the ship customization had enough depth and I had enough money and ship parts that it was even better the second time around. Seeing the campaign again also offered new context to earlier events that foreshadowed later ones, and it was also every bit as hilarious as I remembered.

The tutorial stages of the game are a bit of work, and you have to spend a few levels piloting ships that fire bits of tissue paper and handle like a cow with a firework taped to the side, but it does well to show you the wide variety of classes of ships available. Then the game opens up, gives you full freedom to modify your ships and plenty of missions to try them out in, and one central objective that leads you to tons of ridiculous adventures.

At any moment in this campaign, you can find yourself assaulting a space station by summoning comets to slam into it, racing around a track using your time distortion powers to gain an advantage, riding shotgun on a transport ship being driven by the AI in your head, using a stolen bank vault tethered to your ship via tractor beam as a giant flail for smashing ships, playing pong with positive and negative particles on a quantum scale, fleeing through an asteroid field as it's being obliterated by the psychopath chasing you with a death ray, fighting off waves of drone ships outside a space graveyard that your AI insists on calling "zombies", or infiltrating a space city by evading scanners and timing your way between police patrols.

All those are just the ones I came up with after filtering out the plot spoilers and most ridiculous scenarios that would take full paragraphs to do justice. The plot is a bit jagged due to the structure of the campaign, where the bulk of it lets you approach missions in any order, but it all makes for a great experience on the whole. The writing is a bit hit-and-miss, some jokes genuinely made me laugh, others felt a bit forced, some touching scenes worked well, and others fell flat. No deal breakers, though. The protagonist and their AI make a great duo, and other characters, while not always as distinctly defined as the two leads, do enough to give the universe its own unique feel.

Enough story though, let's talk gameplay. It's sorta like a twin-stick shooter, but aside from rotating you only have forward acceleration and brakes to work with. Additionally, once moving in a direction, you continue to move until Newton says to stop. This takes some getting used to at first (and I would highly recommend a controller to pick up on it faster), but soon you'll adapt, and learn to build momentum then let off the accelerator to strafe or shoot backwards. Plus, one of the equipment slots on your ship will usually be used for an "archetype ability", which is mapped to flicking the right stick or mouse. This can be allocated to launching attacks in a specific direction, or repositioning a directed shield, but more often is used for movement abilities which will allow you to change directions quickly with maneuvers like teleportation or barrel rolling, allowing you to be highly agile and mobile if you want.

This leads us to ship customization, which is where this game shines. There are 5 primary classes of ship, and one oddball. Fighters use powerful forward cannons and have a ton of agility for getting them aimed at enemies, and are nimble enough to compensate for their low shields. Arsenals are the exact opposite, opting for low mobility, high defenses, and lean either towards having tons of firepower, or deploying crowds of turrets and drones. Grapplers are where we start to get away from typical spaceship archetypes, using tractor beams to pull enemies close, and then throwing them into hazards or using deadly short range attacks to tear them apart yourself. Casters are well balanced, with unique abilities that focus on distorting space and time that can be built around to become very powerful. Finally, Rogues use stealth and holographic decoys for defense, letting them plant targeting beacons on enemies in order to launch very powerful attacks.

Within these classes, there are countless options for tuning your build. It can seem overwhelming at first, but the tutorial should help you find a class you enjoy, and from there it's just a matter of finding components that sound interesting, trying them out, and seeing what your ship becomes.

So I had this neat little caster ship, decent speed, shields, and a huge array of weapons made it ideal for fighting powerful enemies, waves of weaker ones, or assaulting giant space stations and cruisers. But it had a problem with power consumption. It'd chew through its energy supply at seemingly random points of the battle, leaving it with no weapons or movement abilities. So I swapped in a caster-specific component that could perpetually generate energy beyond the maximum capacity, but if it got too full, it would shut down my weapons and engines to discharge. This proved to be too much, since I had other energy income that would constantly overload me. I pulled out a few modules that were allowing my weapons to leech power from ships it attacks, and replaced them with ones that powered up my weapons and shields while overcharged (in between normal capacity and overloading). This was still too much, and my ship was EMPing itself every few seconds in battle. I looked at my options for replacing the power core and found one that looked specifically geared toward my ship, which could hold enormous amounts of overcharge energy. I changed out the hull with one that had fewer of the slots I didn't need, and more slots for the kind of tech I was now focusing my build on. Finally I sacrificed few unnecessary weapons for the ability to change out the batteries quickly in the heat of battle, and some more overcharge-powered shield upgrades.

The ship I ended up with was immensely powerful, with a primary weapon that could one-shot most enemies at close range while tanking huge amounts of damage, and its only weakness was a very brief window every once in a while to run off and change batteries. And this is just one of the elements you can build around. I have one fighter class ship built specifically to be the fastest it can be, used to win the racing missions, but still able to put up a fight. I've been meaning to try out a grappler build focused on this one sweet weapon that scrapes off bits of enemy hulls or space junk and then launches it as torrents of shrapnel, shotgun-style, for immense amounts of damage. I had one mission with a side objective to not take any damage from a space station I was attacking, so I built a ship that could stay at a distance and sent waves of mobile gun turrets to fight it.

There are a few criticisms I should mention, just to be fair. As I've said before, the early missions take a while showing you everything the game offers. I recommend using a controller rather than picking up on the more obscure mouse movements. Might also need to switch the steering style in the options. Speaking of which, the menus use a bit of a weird control system that takes some getting used to, where the mouse will snap to the buttons you move it toward. Some missions will leave you stuck with one specific ship which makes their bonus objectives really frustrating when you can't build around them.

But that's all I can think of, aside from the final disappointment that there will probably never be a sequel. This game goes on sales as low as one dollar, and normally goes for five. In my opinion it's easily worth more than either of those prices. At the very least, it's definitely worth taking a risk that small for, in my opinion. A great but sad example of an overlooked gem.

I can't believe it took me so long to discover this game... In a Steam sale at that.

Personally, I'm a big fan of space shooters, but unfortunately the market is flooded with cheap ripoffs, mobile games, etc (with plenty of exceptions both new and old). Sure this is a late review, and most of my hours don't show up on here... But I've played it a-plenty offline for the year I've owned it

~~~~~~Here we go for more detail~~~~~~~

PROS-

-Graphics are pretty good; as well as the interface, menu, and settings being very thorough and informative

-Story is surprisingly well-done, character development very clean and endearing, and even breathes a bit more life into the game

-Gameplay is like your typical arcade shooter.... on a LOT of steroids. You've got guns, you've got missiles, you've got teleportation, special abilities.... GAHHH SO MUCH! And it's actually a dang good challenge! Took me a day or two to even get the hang of the controls, much less the combat itself... You'll be shaking, you'll be screaming, and your blood will be pumping hard in some of these battles, trust me.

-Tutorial is..... I can't even figure out where to begin. It's stunning. They go through every little detail of the system, and at a very safe pace that works VERY well with the story, paces itself accordingly, but still manages to make things interesting.

-Shop and customization.... It's ridiculous. Ship appearances are not capable of being customized, but things like weapons, shields, armor, engines, etc has nearly limitless possibilities. The paid research is also helpful if you're slower to gather Plex (in-game currency). Keep in mind it only stacks to 10 consecutive segments of research if you don't play for a while ;) MAKE SURE YOU WORK ON YOUR SHIP IN THE HANGER, YOU WILL OTHERWISE HAVE A HELLISH TIME!!! (also, you can create and upload ship templates to the Steam Workshop)

-The ships themselves.... GLORIOUS. The design is very appealing, and there's even a class system of sorts for them. THat's right, a CLASS system. I won't spoil anything here, but let's just say its not so simple as "fighter, bomber, stealth", there's way more to it that is very well fleshed out

-Multiplayer is pretty cool... though sadly not many play it anymore. Fortunately the bots for playing the maps yourself are pretty dang good (did I forget to mention the ASTOUNDINGLY good AI?)

-Story is actually quite compelling, and overall pretty kid-friendly (if you're looking for milder sorts of things), and every level is well-tailored to each chapter. Is it repetitive? A little bit at times, but what did you expect from a space-shooter? Some things like the lore and different species could've used some more fleshing out... But it's an indie so that's forgivable. Oh, there's also plenty of good philosophical goodies hidden here and there.

-Music....... brilliant. Not the best, but very fitting for the game and definitely wouldn't mind having it as ambient music, especially the chill little tune that plays in the hangar.

CONS-

-This game's controls are..... Well they're not for the fainthearted. While well-organized and highly customizable, there's a lot to keep track of. You will really HAVE to think, strategize, and set things up according to what you think will suit you. Get used to crashing a lot in the beginning... You'll get the hang of it. (I recommend trying out using an XBox controller, it's a bit easier for some)

-Multiplayer is practically a ghost town (much like Metal Drift.. another forgotten gem), and the community has gone practically dead-silent

-Even on easy, and with it's gentle learning curve, this game isn't really a good choice for newbs to this type of game. That is... Unless you're very gifted at adapting to new games, because this gets REALLY hard REALLY fast near the end of the campaign.

-You have to make sure you manually set a save FROM THE BEGINNING to save to the cloud. Otherwise you will lose all your progress and ships like I did when I uninstalled it for a while.

-Dev team has practically abandoned the game... But its no surprise given it's an Indie (a damn good one at that)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Overall, overwhelming good points and a few bad, I give this game a 9/10 and strongly recommend it to anyone who loves this genre like I do and wants a meatier game to play in it. Or if you just want a fun and unique experience with this quirky little diamond.

Hopefully this game gets a new wave of attention in the future... Here's to hoping!

"Welcome to the show. I'm Fred Bunglemonkey and with me in the studio today is Simon Liekzitt -"

"Hello"

"and Phillip Thinkzitsux"

"Good evening"

"Tonight's topic is Ring Runner: brilliant top down shooter or pile of monkey poo? Simon?"

"Thanks, Fred. The top-down space shooter is a genre that sorely needs more entries. If you like these games, Ring Runner is the game you've been waiting for. It's fast paced and filled with lots of cool mechanics. Ships get multiple weapons, movement abilities, stealth, decoys, etc. There's so much variety that no ship plays even remotely the same. There's a lot more to this game than just pointing at the bad guy and clicking the fire button. Even moving around requires cleverness, with the newtonian physics, dodges, and cool movement abilities."

"I'm sorry, Simon, but I have to disagree. People should give this one a pass. You see it doesn't matter how cool those movement abilities are if you've got to suffer through the controls that activate them. Do you know what the default binding is for the dodge ability? FM. Go ahead, Fred. Look for the FM key on your keyboard. Can't find it? Well, I googled for it and it turns out that FM stands for 'flick mouse'. Go ahead and try it."

"It.. doesn't work."

"I know, right? That's because you need to press mouse button 4 at the same time. Oh, your mouse only has 3 buttons? Then you're SOL. Naw, just kidding. The default controls are awful, but you can rebind them."

"I... uh... well, I went into the 'bindings' menu but I can't seem to change anything"

"That's because the 'bindings' menu doesn't do anything. The menu you want is called 'keybinds'."

"I see. Wow, these menus are terrible. They keep grabbing my mouse pointer or limiting what portion of the screen I can move it in, and many of these options are just a bunch of letters with no explanation. Yes, Simon?"

"Okay, so the menus aren't great -"

"They are the single worst thing ever programmed since the Stuxnet virus."

"-true. But once you suffer through the menus and fix the keybinds, you'll get to the core of the game which is actually a really good shooter. It even has multiplayer with a bunch of great modes including zombie survival and one that plays a lot like a MOBA."

"Cool! Let me try. I guess I click on my hanger and... wow. I guess I... need to... wow. I'm sorry, I have no idea what any of this means."

"Yeah, you should probably read the manual for the hanger first. I took the liberty of printing out a copy for you."

Simon lifts a heavy book onto the table.

"May I interject?"

"Oh, God yes."

"This is what I'm getting at. You're going to need to spend the next several hours figuring out what all these options in the hangar do and customizing your ship... and once you do, there will be nobody online to play it with."

"That's not really the point, Phillip. Multiplayer in this game is something you do with your friends. It's not about public servers."

"Yeah, I may stick with the single player campaign. I'm not sure I want to invest the time in figuring out the hangar interface."

"Unfortunately, you're still going to need the hangar in the single-player campaign... but it's worth it! The campaign is really good and the missions are varied and fun. Even the plot is interesting and filled with some really funny dialogue."

"You're right about that, Simon, but the game pauses every time anyone speaks. This isn't a problem the first few times but after a few hours you're going to want to put your fist through your monitor each time one of those dialog boxes pops up and interrupts your gameplay - and they interrupt it CONSTANTLY."

"Okay, they're a bit annoying but I wouldn't say they ruin the game..."

"I would."

"Well we're almost out of time but the big question remains: brilliant shooter or monkey poo? Should we recommend it?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Meh. I'll just click one of them randomly."

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There aren't very many games I play till I get 100% completion.

I have only played one other game to 100% completion twice (super mario 64) and I plan on doing another 100% completion of this game.

I also don't normally write reviews.

I'm doing all the above because I think this game is fantastic and more people should play it.

This game is unique and while its certainly not for everyone it has a literally overwhelming amount of content in it.

Ring Runner is a top down space shooter who deserves some attention. Storyline, controls and ships, skills, dialogues, maps, everything is done with a noticeable good taste. It's also a game that will entertain you for so many hours, single player alone, but its full of other details, like for example, using steam workshop for sharing ships loadouts.

This is one of those incredible games that never got the attention it deserved. The customisation is very deep, and complex but intuitive once you know what you're doing. The controls may seem wacky at first, but they become second nature after a few hours of gameplay. The controls in Ringrunner allow for extremely skill based combat, and they also give space for fun abilities. Once you get used to it, movement feels very fluid and well-made. This game has more story and gameplay elements than most AAA games, and that for just €8.99. Why are you not buying this already, go buy it, right now, I know you're just looking for an excuse to buy it here anyway, I will be your excuse to buy this amazing game, and the moment you are ingame, you won't need one anymore!

This is one of the best games i've played in my life.
Pros:
+Funny - There are lot of funny dialogues and interactions in the campaing
+++Gameplay - The mechanics are really great. I'm fairly new to space shooters, this one made me want to explore the genre a little more
++Diversity - The game counts with different ship classes you can choose, each one with strategic diferences from each other
+Multiplayer - From the little i've played, the multiplayer seemed balanced and a lot of fun
Cons:
-Controls - Controls are hard to get and harder to master, it adds some difficulty to the game and people often count this as a pro, but in my opinion it dissuades a lot of people from playing this.
= Graphics - A game doesn't have to be a graphic masterpiece to be good, but it's worth mentioning that the graphics are really simple

Solid game with a good replayability and a good price, highly recommended.

This is literally my favorite game ever. (Yes, I have played a ton of games from many genres.) It is so because of its unique combination of story, humor, space, RPG style, gameplay variety, strategy, and newtonian (correct) physics. The game is completely unlike anything I have ever before played or since. I have now played almost 250 hours, and it is the only game I have ever purchased twice just in case anything ever happened to steam I would not want to lose this game. I also really appreciate how clean the game is—that when my children play it I won’t have to worry about swearing or anything like that.

The main story is well written and takes about 30 to 40 hours to complete. Although it is primarily space combat, the game also features circuit racing, stealth missions, tower defense, many rpg elements, zombie survival, arcade games, a plethora of cultural references, fast food, and nonlinear gameplay -- all skillfully integrated into the story. On top of that, the well done ship customization makes the game almost endlessly replayable. $10 for the best game ever.

Several aspects of this game alone are enough to make this game great. Nontheless, they all come together to make a fantastic experience
I'll start with combat. The game starts you out with some crappy ships and crappy weapons. This fits in line with the plot. As you get more vessels and new armaments, you start to pick favorites, and by the time you get to design your first fully customized craft, you already have a good idea of a few combinations that may become standbys for the battles to come. Fighting involves destroying, distracting, subverting, evading, tricking, stunning, outrunning and overpowering the enemies. I am very well convinced that someone could spend a year on this game and barely scratch the surface of all the amazing combinations that have yet to be discovered.
The plot? Enthralling. Through gut renching losses and righteous victories, this game engrains you. Between the universe threatening drama, cheeky humor pervades the dialogue, and the characters, even minor ones, can be quite lovable. What also helps to make this story concrete is the depth of the lore. That, along with the fact that some of the Sci-Fi technology makes sense helps to make this a real feeling world.
The music isn't flashy, but it is a great case study of how one can do great things with only a few tools. I heard there guys aren't even musicians. The graphics use shiny light and pretty colors to draw you in, with atmospheric backgrounds the fit right in place.
Some of the cons involve the layout. It can be difficult to navigate the hangar and switch ships. Finding your favorite presets can be irksome, and there doesn't seem to be a way to test ship combinations without going into a story mission. Most of the game is fighting, with some racing and stealth in there too. This is, however, broken up by the jovial dialogue and a few puzzles.
In short, this game had a lot of careful quality and love put into it. It is easily worth more that $10.

What a hidden gem this game is.

The game is a top-down space shooter with newton physics, meaning if you accelerate in one direction you will not stop until you turn around and apply thrust... or hit something, this makes the combat fun and fluid.

There are a ton of ship hulls available with about 300 or so abilities and weapons available so your creativity can run riot, a good amount of them are unlocked via the campaign but you can also research them using the in-game currency to unlock them earlier should you wish.

The campaign is immensely long and I loved it every bit of it, even if you try speed through the game it'll still take you about 15 hours, and that’s not even including the time for completing bonus objectives, mini-games or arcade events available.

Edit: The soundtrack is also freaking awesome.


10/10, would have bought at full price the day it was released if I'd have known about it then.

I bought this game during a sale because it looked cool.

... I never knew I was buying one of the best games I've ever played.

Everything is top-notch... gameplay, graphics, storyline. I haven't played a game this immersive since the Escape Velocity series.

Stay the hell away if you want to have a life.

A week ago I honestly hadn't heard of this game, I bought it on a whim, a longing for SPAZ2, and being a huge fan of RPG/Shooter type games, came together at a moment of weakness.

I was completely blown away, it was the most fun I've had in a game all year, and probably my favorite shooter of all time, a title previously held by Tyrian. I just can't praise you enough, it was fun the entire way. I just finished the campaign, and I really just loved it.

The ship control is a bit wonky at first, but after a few missions you should have it under control. And after a few hours you'll be amazed at some of the stuff you can pull off in speedy ships. The humor and writing style of the game might not be for everyone, but I really wouldn't let that stop you from buying the game. Remove all the words and the game is still an amazingly solid Shooter with a huge amount of customization, and balanced so that no ship type ever feels like the end all ship, I spent a solid 25 hours beating the game on Sage(normal) and will probalby put another 10-15 hours unlocking and customizing my ship.

Seiously, if you liked SPAZ, Tyrian, Raptor, or any shooter game in general buy this game. You won't regret it.

Ring Runner follows FTL into the illusive zone of flawless indie game glory. It is almost criminal that it took this game as long as it did to get on Steam. Addictive gameplay with an incredibly smooth UI, and a staggering amount of flexibility, with a depth and sophistication that will continue to surprise you. There are countless ships, with a fitting system of a quality you will be hard pressed to find outside of EVE Online. The story and dialogue is surprisingly good, at times goofy, often trippy and surreal and almost always hilarious. The graphics are absolutely beautiful, proof that it is not always necessary to melt your video card.

One comment which might be helpful, and which is only negative depending on your preferences, is in regard to how episodic the game is. I did not necessarily expect an "open world" but did expect some greater degree of openness to the campaign than I encountered. There really is none, the campaign is very episodic. Initially this may seem like a significant down side, but it gradually picks up and at least provides you with a little bit of choice.

A campaign and maps with significantly more "openness" I think would easily have pushed this onto a short list of some of the best games ever made, but as is Ring Runner is truly a jewel worth far more than the measily $10 they are asking for.