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TOWER-DEFENSE
Rise to Ruins Review: A Village Sim That Actually Wants You to Fail (And I Respect That)
I've played more village sims than I care to admit, and most of them hold your hand like you're five. Rise to Ruins? It laughs at your failures, watches your villagers starve, and somehow makes you come back for more.
Paul
December 22, 2025
7.4
Overall Score
"Rise to Ruins surprised me, and I hate being surprised because it means I have to admit I was wrong about something."
First Impressions (Or: Here We Go Again)
Look, I've been reviewing village simulators since before half of you were born, and I approached Rise to Ruins with all the enthusiasm of someone opening their utility bills. Another pixel art strategy game promising to blend genres? Sure. I've heard that one before. But then something weird happened: I actually lost. Not in a 'whoops, I made a mistake' way, but in a 'my entire village is on fire and I have no idea what I did wrong' way. And you know what? That got my attention. Most modern village sims are so terrified of player failure that they've sucked all tension out of the experience. Rise to Ruins looks at that design philosophy and says 'nah, you're going to die, repeatedly, and you're going to learn to like it.' The audacity. The game doesn't waste time with tutorials that treat you like you've never used a mouse before. It drops you in, gives you the basics, and watches you flail. Rayvolution clearly played a lot of Settlers back in the day and decided what that game really needed was for everything to go horribly wrong more often.
The Godlike Village Sim Thing (It's Complicated)
Here's where Rise to Ruins gets interesting despite itself. You're not directly controlling villagers like some kind of micromanagement nightmare â you're playing a god who places buildings and influences decisions while your little pixel people stumble around trying not to die. It's the Populous approach mixed with Banished's 'everyone will starve if you sneeze wrong' philosophy. You'll spend your time designating where things go, managing resources that never seem quite enough, and watching your carefully laid plans crumble when winter hits or monsters show up. The village management has actual depth â you need housing, food production, water, defenses, and about seventeen other things I'm forgetting because I'm deliberately blocking out the trauma. Resources chain together in ways that seem logical until you realize you've created a bottleneck that's slowly strangling your entire economy. The survival aspect isn't some tacked-on difficulty mode; it's baked into everything. Your villagers will absolutely die from exposure, starvation, or monster attacks if you're not paying attention. The game doesn't pause to ask if you're sure about your decisions. It just lets you fail and encourages you to try again smarter.
Tower Defense Elements (Because Apparently Village Sims Are Too Easy)
So managing a village wasn't stressful enough â Rayvolution decided to throw in waves of enemies that want to destroy everything you've built. Brilliant. Except it actually kind of works? The tower defense layer forces you to think about village layout in ways most sims don't. You can't just sprawl everywhere; you need defensive chokepoints, walls, towers, and enough military buildings to keep the hordes at bay. It's not as refined as dedicated tower defense games â don't expect Bloons-level polish here â but it adds genuine tension to the mid and late game. Monsters don't just politely wait for you to be ready. They show up, they're relentless, and they will absolutely wreck your stuff if you've been focusing too much on aesthetics and not enough on 'how do I keep my people from being eaten.' The combination of building up your village while preparing for the next attack creates this constant pressure that I haven't felt in a village sim since... honestly, I can't remember when. Most games in this genre let you sandbox peacefully. Rise to Ruins said 'no thanks, have some existential dread instead.'
Learning Through Failure (My Favorite Kind of Suffering)
This is where the game either hooks you or makes you uninstall in frustration. Rise to Ruins embraces roguelike design: you will fail, often, and each failure teaches you something new. Died because you didn't build enough housing? Cool, don't do that next time. Entire village froze because you didn't prepare for winter? Lesson learned. Got overrun because you thought one tower would be enough? Adorable. What makes this work â and this is critical â is that each run feels different enough that you're not just grinding through the same mistakes. Different maps, different challenges, different ways to catastrophically miscalculate your food production. The progression system lets you unlock new buildings and abilities between runs, so you're constantly gaining tools to approach problems differently. It's the kind of design that respects your intelligence while simultaneously showing you how much you still don't know. I appreciate that in a game the same way I appreciate a good insult: it stings, but it's earned.
What Actually Works Here
Let me be clear about something: I didn't expect to still be playing Rise to Ruins after the first hour. But the core gameplay loop is legitimately compelling in ways that surprised me. The balance between building, defending, and surviving creates genuine strategic decisions rather than obvious optimal paths. You're constantly weighing risks: do I expand now or fortify? Do I invest in more housing or better defenses? Do I push for that resource node or play it safe? The game also has this subtle genius where your villagers have needs and behaviors that feel organic rather than scripted. They're not just resource-gathering robots; they get tired, scared, and will absolutely abandon you if things get too dire. It creates emergent moments where your careful plans collide with reality and you have to adapt on the fly. Also, and I'm saying this grudgingly, the difficulty curve is actually well-tuned. It's hard without being unfair. When you lose, it's usually because you made a mistake, not because the game cheated. That's increasingly rare in indie strategy games that mistake 'difficult' for 'arbitrarily punishing.'
Rating Breakdown
Quality
7.5
Surprisingly polished for something that's clearly been obsessively iterated on â minimal bugs, solid performance, though the UI could use another pass from someone who doesn't already know where everything is.
Innovation
7
Combining village sim with tower defense isn't revolutionary, but the godlike layer and the relentless difficulty curve creates something I haven't quite played before, even if it smells like Settlers had a baby with They Are Billions.
Value
8
The amount of content versus price is absurd â I've sunk more hours into this than I'd admit in polite company, and I'm still finding new ways to catastrophically fail.
Gameplay
7.5
The core loop of build-defend-die-learn actually works, which is rare; I kept playing even when angry, which is basically the gold standard for 'one more turn' syndrome.
Audio/Visual
6
Functional pixel art that won't win awards but gets the job done, audio is forgettable but not offensive â basically, it looks like every other indie strategy game from the past decade.
Replayability
8.5
The roguelike 'try again and don't screw up THIS time' structure means every run feels different enough that I haven't rage-uninstalled yet, which is saying something.
What Didn't Annoy Me
The build-defend-survive loop actually creates meaningful tension instead of being three separate systems fighting each other
Difficulty that respects your intelligence â when you fail, you learn something rather than just feeling cheated
Enough depth in the village management that I'm still discovering new strategies after way too many hours
Roguelike structure with unlockable progression means failed runs don't feel completely wasted
Resource management that requires actual thought instead of just spamming buildings everywhere
What Made Me Sigh
UI clearly designed by someone who already knows where everything is â new players will struggle to find basic functions
Pixel art aesthetic is perfectly serviceable but completely forgettable â I couldn't describe the visual style if you paid me
Audio design exists but contributes absolutely nothing to the experience; I played most of it muted
Learning curve is brutal enough that many players will bounce off before the game clicks
Could use more variety in tower defense enemies â after a while, the monster waves start feeling samey
Final Verdict
Rise to Ruins surprised me, and I hate being surprised because it means I have to admit I was wrong about something. This is a legitimately good village simulator that successfully blends genres without feeling like a confused mess. It's challenging in ways that make you want to retry rather than ragequit, and it has enough depth that I'm still finding new approaches after more hours than I care to count. The presentation won't blow anyone away, and the UI needs work, but the core gameplay is solid enough that I keep coming back. If you loved the old Settlers games but wished they were harder and had more existential dread, this is your jam. If you want a cozy village builder where nothing bad happens, absolutely skip this. Rise to Ruins earns its 7.6 by being genuinely clever about difficulty and player agency in a genre that usually plays it safe. Rayvolution made something that respects your time by not wasting it on hand-holding, and that's rare enough to deserve recognition.
Rise to Ruins
Genre
Tower Defense
Developer
RayvolutionPlatform
Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Date
Jan 1, 2023
Rating
7.4
/10
Tags
village-simulator
tower-defense
roguelike
strategy
survival
godgame
pixel-art
challenging
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