Heroes of Ruin

Keith grabbed a bunch of copies of this game, Heroes of Ruin for Stan's bachelor party/road-trip this past August, with the assumption that with all of that driving and all of those 3DSes we would want to try some sort of co-op campaign while on the road. The pickings were slim for co-op games, so he grabbed this game which I had never heard of but at least was published by Back-Blog mainstay Square-Enix so we had some idea what we were getting into. It's a randomly-generated dungeon crawler where you can play as one of four classes- vindicator, gunslinger, alchitect, and savage, in order to save some kingdom from some impending doom. Given how easy it was to skip over cutscenes and how cheesy they were, there was little hope that I'd pay any attention to the plot, so I won't comment on that. How was the gameplay? Well, it was mixed. Developer n-Space attempted to put some depth into the combat, so as not to completely devolve into button-mashing, but there was typically little reason to stray from the same old basic attacks over and over again. You run around randomly-generated dungeons attacking whatever comes your way, and while this was mostly fun, by the end of the game it was starting to get pretty repetitive. The few boss fights and puzzles that deviated from the core gameplay ended up being the strongest parts of the game. Also of note is that the co-op and online play was probably the best I've seen on a Nintendo console- Nintendo is notoriously terrible with "friend codes" and all sorts of obstacles getting in the way of a fun online experience, so being able to play co-op with my friends this easily on a handheld Nintendo system was a nice change. Still though, after about 6 hours of gameplay I had apparently completed 94% of the game- it's just so easy to button-mash your way through the whole thing that I can't recommend you go out and purchase. But I do recommend that Keith plays through it, since he's got that shit in his backlog!