Battle Chaser.
While you might not know Airship Syndicate by name, you might know its creative director; comic book artist Joe Madureira. His small studio has had a great track record when it has come to its offerings. Both Battle Chasers and Darksiders Genesis were fantastic adventures, and they are now back with a whole new game; Ruined King: A League of Legends Story. While “new” is certainly correct, you could easily mistake this game for that of their debut title Battle Chasers, considering the stark similarities between them. Still, Ruined King offers up a wonderful adventure for a few of its well-known League characters, even if the journey is filled with various bugs and issues that may test your patience more so than your combat skills ever will.
Alongside the stellar Arcane animated series, Riot has spent the last few years taking some of its well-established characters from its League of Legends game and fleshing them out across a variety of different mediums. Seeing the world of Runeterra from different perspectives, even in somewhat of a limited scope is certainly appealing, and like Overwatch, a lot of its character development and story are found outside of its main attraction. Up until I watched Arcane, I knew maybe all of four or five League characters and had never once touched the game, Sure, I knew of Jinx, Miss Fortune, Teemo, and a few others from seeing pictures of them, but that was largely it. While I’ve since recently tried League, and found it’s simply not for me, it is these side-adventures like Arcane and Ruined King that have certainly hooked me into their roster of characters, eager to see what else waits in the wings for fleshing out the other 140+ roster of remaining characters.
At an initial glance, as mentioned previously, you could easily mistake Ruined King for a Battle Chasers sequel or addon as it is so visually similar in its art style and gameplay that the games share an incredible amount of their DNA. Everything from how the characters look, their animations, to the aesthetic the game serves, and the motion comic-style cutscenes are certainly cut from the very same cloth. Hell, you could almost say that the cut scraps of said cloth are being repurposed here in some capacity. Now, this isn’t a bad thing at all as Battle Chasers was a damn fine game, and thankfully, Airship Syndicate does enough new through its combat to really separate the two, showing that the studio has grown a lot since their debut Kickstarter backed adventure.
While you’ll have a cast of six characters to tinker around with, min-maxing their builds, equipping them with items and weapons, the narrative is largely focused on Miss Fortune and Illaoi, with the remaining four characters largely along for the ride. There are certainly other League mainstays that you’ll interact with, or fight at key moments in the game, but more or less, Fortune and Illaoi are who the plot is mostly centered around. Now having said that, characters like Yasuo and Ahri certainly have their moments, each getting decently sized narrative threads woven into the fabric of this adventure. You’ll also be joined by Braum and Pyke, but they are largely there to serve a smaller purpose, as Braum, for example, provides a lighter tone around this dark and moody journey due to his charming and extremely positive personality. Pyke, on the other hand, simply wants to kill things, and can also swim around to unlock new locations, making him a vital member of the team for unlocking a vast array of secrets.
The main narrative that brings these characters all together is centered around a few antagonists; Gangplank, Thresh, and that of the Ruined King himself, Viego. While Gangplank serves as the known badguy to the team for some time, nearly every character joins up to serve their own needs, only to be caught in the middle of something far more sinister. You’ll be introduced to nearly everyone early on, but Ahri doesn’t officially join into the fray until nearly halfway through the adventure. Regardless of their use, or limited narrative focus, every character is wonderfully fleshed out due to some smart writing, engaging conversations, and fantastic voice acting, all performed by their League of Legends voice cast.
The story of stopping the Ruined King from taking over the world is wonderfully paced with engaging conversations between the group, often at rest points where you can also prepare some food, something extremely similar to what Tales of Arise brought to the table months ago. These conversations are often short and to the point and show the seeds of friendship being planted between much of the group. There are also the comic-style cutscenes by Ludo Lullabi that feel more confident than his Battle Chasers work, as well as the stunning character portraits by both Joe Mad and Hicham Habchi, an artist who is no stranger to working on League of Legends content. The rest of the game is visually stunning, offering a vast arrangement of dark and moody environments, while also some bright and more colorful areas to offset those darker locations.
If you’ve played Battle Chasers, the foundation here is going to feel very familiar. You’ll explore your surroundings through a Diablo-style isometric view, and combat takes place in a front-facing turn-based affair, with your team on the left, and your enemies on the right. If you pull in multiple enemies in the exploration phases, you’ll bring additional waves in, making it sometimes more efficient from a time perspective to engage in as many foes as possible in one go. And, should you simply want to take part in the story and leave combat behind, story difficulty allows you to skip all battles, and retain any and all rewards you would have received taking part, even the boss encounters. Hell, even dying allows you to skip the battle, making it a solid adventure for newcomers to the genre.
And, speaking of newcomers, Ruined King doesn’t require any knowledge of the League of Legends games to understand anything that is going on, much like how Arcane didn’t require any sort of lore knowledge to grasp who was who and what certain things and places meant to the story. Newcomers may have to take a bit to allow certain arcs to happen to grasp the whole identity of certain characters, but there isn’t a moment in the game where I felt lost as to who was who or what they were going through. Each character has some personal motive to fight alongside one another, whether it’s to honor a contract, seek revenge, or follow their faith, even when it doesn’t answer back to them. Still, each and every character can be enjoyed to their fullest here without knowing a lick of who they are in another game.
As is the case with any RPG, combat is going to play a huge focus on your time spent with the game and Ruined King does not disappoint. Taking inspiration from the source material, Ruined King’s combat is handled through lanes. While these lanes differ greatly from the actual League of Legends game, it’s a solid nod to the MOBA all the same. Here, the lanes are represented with Speed, Balanced, and Power. These lanes take the same abilities and manipulate them based on the lane you’ve chosen as Speed will weaken the effect but perform it quicker whereas Power will increase the potency but take longer in the end. Balance is, of course, the middle ground, but picking the right lane isn’t always about speed or power, it’s also about the perks that come with some of those choices and how you have chosen to spec your party.
For example, a character that I really enjoyed using was Ahri. I adore her design, her voice acting, and her set of abilities that allow her to work as a team healer. Each character’s abilities have six nodes that can see three active at once, each warping and twisting each ability in unique ways. You can freely change them at will, to either adjust them for a harsh battle ahead or if you watched a Youtube video on the best builds in the game and want to respec your team. Either way, let’s take Ahri’s healing ability Spirit Mend for a spin. Ahri’s power derives from Essence Theft, which when built up with enough stacks, boosts her power and critical rating. Spirit Mend’s range will increase as you level up, but right now, it heals for just over a third of my companion's health, and when used with additional stacks of Essence Theft, it heals even more. If I use Spirit Mend in the Speed lane, it cleanses two debuffs from my target, whereas if I use it in the Power lane, it will heal all allies for almost a thousand health. This type of flexibility and ability altering occurs for nearly every single character across a wide spectrum of skills, making it incredibly varied in how you can run your team.
Combat essentially starts in a few phases. Each battle will have some form of a condition placed upon it. These are indicated by the inclusion of Hazards, Boons, or Wildcards. These take the place of an aura placed on the initiative bar, the lanes that indicates the turn order of battle. Hazards harm your team, Boons provide beneficial effects to those that land within them, whereas Wildcards will benefit not only your team but your foes as well, such as healing or a boost to your or their attack. These effects shake up combat and always have you watching which lane your powers operate in, as well as where you may end up after using them. If a Boon is located in the Power lane, you may want to take the extra time to pull off that attack and land there, seeing a reward for your choice in attack.
Character abilities fall into either Instant or Lane abilities. Instant skills take place immediately but are usually weaker. However, some instant skills may build up additional mana called Overcharge, or work on the building up of character-specific buffs that benefit your team. Illaoi, for example, can gain the might of little tentacle arms that erupt all around her, and each instant attack, if spec’d correctly, will bring more to the fight, making attacks that benefit from them that much more effective. These Instant skills lend themselves to making other skills stronger, so sometimes getting in those weaker hits will have you playing the long game in regards to bringing the pain later on. Lane abilities are those that you place in the Speed, Balanced, or Power lanes, as previously explained and range from standard attacks to support skills like healing individual targets or the group as a whole. Lastly, we have Ultimate abilities, and while some are devastating in their power, some require certain conditions to be met in order to be truly effective, such as ensuring Illaoi has enough tentacles summoned to be sacrificed in order to justify the healing arts used in her Ultimate. If you lack those little green glowing tentacles around her, you'll barely see this skill do much of anything other than the damage it inflicts to your opposition.
Ruined King’s ability system is vast in its flexibility, offering you a wide range of creating builds to make certain attacks and skills work to your benefit, but then we also have Runes, which are an additional method of increasing each character’s stats into even more flexibility. Each character has two subclasses to work with. Braum has Bulwark and Strongman, whereas Pyke has Assassin and Drowned One. Each of these subclasses has eight runes that affect anything from attack power, health, or boosting your critical rating and more. Runes are unlocked as you progress through the game and you’ll unlock Rune points to place within each slot, progressing from those that require one Rune point to those that require more. You can split your points up to cover the field more or sink more points into those that require a greater number of points to unlock. It’s a system that I think the game could have left out considering how the abilities work, but I am glad it is there to increase a few essential stats even further.
And, if you thought that was enough stats changes to work into the group, well, you would be mistaken as you can also enchant any item you buy or find in one of the many chests littered around the game, easily found with a pulse system that highlights them on the field. You’ll gather materials from every encounter, or via shops, or through said chests, and you can use recipes you discover to enchant items to increase your attack power, defense, or any other stats that benefit each unique fighter. You can also overwrite each upgrade, but the game doesn’t really tell you that you are overwriting it, as for a while I assumed I was adding to it, not erasing my previous enhancement. On harder difficulties, you’ll easily want to min-max this to get the most out of each character. The recipe that I used the most was having my health refresh after every battle, saving me mana to heal them in the next fight, or the constant use of potions to top them up.
Apart from the main story, you'll have a wide range of side quests and bounties to tackle, each boosting your experience earnings a great deal, as well as all the gold you'll be pocketing. Side quests are simple and usually are just a point-to-point effort without being too elaborate, though, finding out what a pair of shopkeepers were really up to was incredibly fascinating. You'll also have fishing, and while I rarely felt the desire to take it on, it's another system that has come in from Battle Chasers and feels like something added since the coding was already there. Several NPCs will have things to say, so taking the time to talk to everyone you encounter does grant a bit more to the world building that Airship Syndicate is aiming for.
While the map you're given is pretty suitable for navigating your way around each of the few areas, I am shocked that the game doesn't have a mini-map considering all the maze-like pathing present here. I constantly had to bring my map up, making sure I wasn't taking a wrong turn as there isn’t really any sort of destination marker to aid in finding you way. I also had issues with the map loading on the Switch. It would eventually load each time I needed it, but often when entering into a new area the map would take almost 8-10 seconds to load each time. I also found that apart from two or three puzzles, many would have their solutions just far too close to where said puzzle was, such as the light-shaping puzzles where you try to match a pattern on a nearby wall. One game that did this in a rather smart way was Resident Evil Village where while you had the solution, the orientation of said solution wasn’t 1:1 and allowed that puzzle to be both simple and yet clever in how it gave you the answer.
During my time with Ruined King on Switch, I had one glitch that affected nearly 90% of my playthrough. When selecting any piece of armor to browse all the new items I would find or buy, I could never back out of one item to then quickly select another slot. Instead, I had to back out entirely to then select equipment again and select the next slot to change my gear. Eventually, I found that swapping from character to character allowed me to select items again, but it wasn’t until the last few hours of the game where I could actually select gear as intended. In my 40+ hours with the game, this system worked for maybe four or five hours at most. While this is an issue that seems fixed now as loading up the game does allow me to freely browse my items, it was still something that affected enough of my experience to warrant a mention. Apart from that issue, I had a few instances where some character models were invisible during a few fights, my UI not showing up during battles or the fact that the game’s time kept recording even when my Switch was in sleep mode. I’ll also stress that the load times on Switch are not horrible, but your initial load time is pretty damn long. And, considering the lack of navigation outside of the map, accidentally moving into an area I didn’t want to progress into meant I had to deal with several loading screens over and over again.
Apart from these issues, Ruined King is certainly a title I really have no problem recommending as it’s just damn fun and takes the League of Legends license and builds upon it in ways that benefits the characters it utilizes here. The story itself is well written, with dialogue that often feels well-phrased and purposeful. The combat is incredibly deep with a vast arrangement of stat-based items and ability systems that allow you to create some truly overpowered builds. Airship Syndicate clearly took their format for Battle Chasers and retooled it for this adventure and honestly, I don’t blame them since it’s a solid framework for what it does. As was the case with Arcane, these side adventures have made me a fan of the property, of its varied and engaging characters, and I don’t even need to play League of Legends to get the most out of that roster.
Developer - Airship Syndicate. Publisher - Riot Games, Riot Forge. Released - November 16th, 2021. Available On - Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows. Rated - (T) Alcohol Reference, Blood, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes.
Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch OLED. Review Access - Ruined King was purchased by the reviewer.