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Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages Review

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages Review

Where retro arcade gameplay meets RPG meets space and ships and lots of pewpewpew, Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is a surprisingly neat little game.

Awakening from some ill-advised surgery, you find yourself talking to an artificial intelligence augmentation now implanted in your head, and so begins a buddy cop movie relationship of sorts between you and a voice inside your head. Cracking jokes at every turn and keeping you ever apprised of knowledge, your AI augment is both guide and guardian angel. It tells you when to run from a fight in which you'd have no hope of winning, and informs you of enemies' weak spots, tells you how to navigate space and the slightly complex menu system in the game. But hey, it's not all a selfless act, it needs you alive so it can carry on existing inside you, a fact it every so often likes to remind you of.

When the game proper started, I initially found the controls to be a bit tricky, but I was treating it like a twin-stick shooter as it instantly boots up looking and feeling like one; the simple, distant ship you control, top-down against a twinkly starry backdrop. But no, Geometry Wars this ain't, as controls are a lot more intricate and dynamic than it would first appear.

 RingRunner pic 2

Firstly, you have to deal with some fairly realistic inertia, yet still retaining an arcade feel to the controls. The slightest thrust of the engine and your momentum will keep you going on and on, minding the occasional piece of space debris as you go. At its most critical, using up the last of your afterburner, fleeing from an unfair fight and steering at speed through a minefield of derelict ships and space junk is quite a thrill once you've mastered the OTT drifts and sharp airbraking. The controls are like Othello; simple to learn, difficult to master, but there's satisfaction and a chufty badge in it for you if you put in the time.

As for combat, in the early stages at least, it's a fairly simple affair. Point at a ship and press fire. But shortly into Ring Runner is your crappy little ship upgraded with weaponry and defensive measures. You get up to four slots for your weapons which depend largely on what class of ship you own and how far through the game you have progressed. After a short while you are treated to two varying degrees of battleship and their awesome, inspired weapons.

Lasers and bombs are standard fare, but there are many different ways to harm or evade your enemies. Naturally, the more awesome a weapon, the more likely it is to overheat, so don't get too reliant on the super-fast 5-way laser, it's going to cripple your ship if used too carelessly. But upgrade your ship to one that can occasionally flush the ship of the radiation behind itself, harming anyone that gets in the radioactive cloud and cooling the ship down in the process, and problem solved. There are a few weapons that work really well together when used in tandem, some are just plain cool by themselves. Eventually, after a fairly sizable chunk of story, the choice is yours. You assign a weapon to each of your four slots and mixing offensive fire is simple and a lot of fun.

 Ring Runner pic 4

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is by no means an action-packed game. Futuristic dogfighting comes at you every now and again, but these instances can at times occur only occasionally. Underneath its initial beautiful graphics combined with minimalistic, subtle HUD beats the heart of an RPG. There's an amount of dialogue boxes to cycle through before each level, progressing the story through witty, if a little shallow, dialogue. There are more and more elements of your story to unfold slowly as you progress, and more and more aliens and other beings who want to kill you for some reason, explained by your implant.

Occasionally the levels can be a bit long, lacking in battles, and generally a little unexciting, but everything has a purpose. Tedious space debris collecting exercises actually teach manoeuvrability  and how to use some of the game's more complex traction weapons. Some levels you're just told 'he's too powerful. Run!' and you just have to turn and run from a fight, navigating through junk. But this is not a detraction from the game, as it never feels like you're doing something for the sake of it. Another game would pad out its lifespan by chucking in a load of fetch quests, but Ring Runner subtly teaches you the intricacies of the game over a long time through innovative level design.

One thing to mention is that the graphics are excellent, at times jaw-dropping, using the game's 2.5D effect to maximum effect. Torpedoes and flaming meteorites fire down on you from behind your computer screen at your little ship, still stuck on a 2D field, all the while enjoying the sights of engulfing planets and twinkling stars going past slowly using some old school parallax scrolling. A particularly tricky space battle was lost as I stared out in wonder at Saturn. In contrast with the fantastic artwork in the back, and the hulking great derelict ships that tear through the 2D field on a 3D plane, simple blue wireframes highlight obstacles in your path. Ships, meteors, debris, they get a rather ugly blue line around them which helps you progress and not smash into things a lot easier, but I can't help but feel that the game would be a whole lot more beautiful, albeit much more difficult, without them. But it'd be worth it.

 Ring Runner pic 5

A large green rectangle overshadows any notion of an open world element, defining your play area from the start of each level to the end. If you fly outside of this zone, the game makes a good job of tugging you back in without feeling forced, even though it is. Gripe as I might, these are not exactly dealbreakers. For its lack of pacing and taking too long to open up the proper RPG side to the game, where you can waste hours customising and tinkering with new spacecraft, weapons, abilities, etc, Ring Runner executes many elements really well indeed, but is just short of perfecting them.

The story is enjoyable but lacking in depth. The script is witty but verbose. The combat is slick, stylish and fun, but at varying lengths between battles, it doesn't happen so often. The menus and upgrading are deep and varied, but take too long to really become tangible or fun. I could easily recommend Ring Runner to anyone, as it is simply a good-looking game with fun, innovative weapons, but a true shooter fan might be put off by its initial lack of enjoyable arcade action, and RPG fans like myself could be turned off by a genuinely funny (sometimes) script that lacks any real direction storywise. But find that happy medium, that small overlapping middle piece on the Venn diagram, and you'll most likely get sucked in at some point.

7.50/10 7½

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages

This game is good, with a few negatives.

A little too shallow for RPG fans, a little light on combat levels for action fans, Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is still highly enjoyable with great visuals, intuitive controls and a great, if at times too wordy, script. Good sci-fi fun.

This game was supplied by the publisher or relevant PR company for the purposes of review
Gary Durston

Gary Durston

Staff Writer

Gary has been a gamer all his life and is a total retrohead. A lover of games, gaming and just about anything with a pixel, really.

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