And at last, my review of Ruins of the Risen, based on what I believe is the final-submission version:
[spoiler]
Ruins of the Risen is a top-down shooter; the player-character is searching amongst some sort of ruins for sign of their son, battling through seemingly-endless hordes of monsters to find randomly-placed clues.
In the previous version that I played, I struggled to figure out where I was and what was going on--this version is far more manageable, I do believe, and thus rather more fun! As far as I played, the gunplay seemed fairly solid and engaging.
The lighting is pretty dark, and the screen pretty busy, with a contrast between walls and floor that I feel was perhaps a bit low. All of this combined, I believe, to make it a little difficult for me to get a sense of my surroundings. A slightly less-cluttered backdrop, with a starker contrast between walls and floor, might have aided my navigation of the levels. Nevertheless, I generally managed to make my way around, albeit with some stumbling about.
The player-character moves very fast; while this does mean that enemies can be easily outrun, I found the character to move so fast that I sometimes felt a little out of control, and all too often zipped into barely-noticed traps. That said, the movement controls seem to me to be overall rather responsive.
On the other hand, the firing controls are a little iffy, to my mind. The character continues to fire while the mouse-button is held, as one might expect, but doing so prevents the player from moving the aiming reticule, which I found to be a bit of a nuisance. One can fire using the space-bar instead, which doesn't incur this restriction (why this difference?), but that doesn't feel quite as natural to me as using the mouse-button.
As to the enemies, the game is dark enough that I'm not entirely confident of how many types I saw during my play-through; I'm not sure of whether I like that or not. I'm aware of two: a thing that looked a bit like a horseshoe crab (which I gather was a "darkworm"), and what seemed to be zombies ("risen minions"). Individually, none makes for much of a threat--but they're seldom encountered individually, and a player who is careless, or who remains in one place for too long, can quite easily be overrun.
I do have one significant critique regarding the enemies: it seems that they can spawn right on top of the player, which can make for some frustrating encounters, I feel. I think that I would have preferred that there be a minimum distance at which they may spawn, allowing the player more time to respond.
There are a number of weapons available, of which I believe that I found three (above the starting weapon): a rocket launcher, a machine gun, and a laser. All seemed to work fairly well.
Finally, I encountered a few bugs, I believe:
First, the last button pressed during a cutscene seems to remain "pressed" as far as the game is concerned, until--I think--either the button is pressed and released again, or certain events clear it. On the plus side, this can somewhat ameliorate the problem of the mouse-button preventing mouse-aiming. On the minus side, one cutscene occurs during gameplay, and tends to pop up while I'm moving, and thus resulted in my character speeding across the screen a few times, ending up right next to a saw-blade.
Second, I had a few cases in which I restarted a level to be greeted by the "you are dead" message and no control over the character; pressing escape to bring up the "quit" menu and then cancelling that dialogue seemed to fix the problem.
[/spoiler]
