RONIN: The backlog is dead

   There's only 4 skills, with a couple of power ups for each, but I only found two skills useful throughout the game. You need stamina to use skills, which you get by knocking(1 stamina) or killing enemies (2 stamina). All good here, so what's the problem? Any other non skill action also takes stamina away from you. Unless you fall on an enemy directly from above, you're going to push it further away from you when knocking it, which means you have to use the stamina you just gained from knocking him to get near him again to kill him. Not knocking him means he can use his turn to shoot you, and you don't want that, since one shot will kill you. Let's take the sword throw as an example. This skill (as some others) has the condition that you need to be airborne to use it, and it requires two stamina. So, you kill an enemy, get two stamina, and go airborne, which uses up one stamina. Now, you're left with just one stamina so you can't use the sword throw. This is just one example but the stamina system really limits the times you can use skills, and it's just one of the problems this game has.

Another problem: Variety. I think I understand why there's only two 4 skills: the game's really short. I'm guessing the dev didn't want to overwhelm the player with too many options or didn't want to make the character too overpowered, and the solution to that was limit the number of skills. The problem with this is that more choices would add replayability and you could allow the player to adjust to their own preferred playstyle, not to mention making combat more fun, which brings us to the next problem of the game: The combat is too bloody repetitive.

   The combat is too repetitive. There's only 4 unique enemies. 4!! Introducing: Guy with gun, guy with machine gun, guy with sword and guy with phone! Gun guy shoots at you every turn, machine gun guy shoots at the same spot twice, basically suppressing fire, guy with sword does a dash, and can only be knocked down and subsequently killed by attacking him. Guy with phone triggers a lockdown of the facility after 8 turns, and that's it. This four enemies are all you're going to see for the whole game, so you better start asking names so you can refer to each other on a first-name basis. There's also civilians, which you're not supposed to kill, but they are more a nuisance than a meaningful game mechanic. The only diversity in later levels is that more guys show up to the party. I'm okay with not having many enemies when the ones you have are complex and interesting and make for varied gameplay, which is sadly not the case here. Every battle is 90% similar to the last, and after a while you either get annoyed because the amount of enemies is frustrating or because it's too easy to win small fights since you already know what to do.

Since it's turn based, I'm guessing the developer wants you to approach combat as if it were chess, but since skills are extremely restrictive, enemies are boring after a while and there's little to no complexity to the gameplay, I'd say you have to approach it more as if you were playing a very action packed game of UNO. The icing on the cake: Controls are also extremely restrictive.

   If you're not in a fight, you can jump, move and throw hooks at your heart content. During a fight though? Well, obviously it's very bad etiquette to move during fights, you can only jump in wide arcs and waste a turn throwing a hook without knowing exactly what trajectory you're going to make when swinging from it. We're all familiar with the concept of gravity, right? If you're hanging from a thread, you can't apply force on the thread to propel yourself towards the sides, you need to go straight down! Any deviation from this would destroy modern science as we know it, clearly.

Seriously, though, you'll be fighting the controls almost as much as you'll be fighting the enemies, but mostly because sometimes they don't act as you initially intended, and while it may not always kill you, it will frustrate you to no end when it does. I had way more fun with the game when you weren't on a combat situation, and I was stealthily swing from roof to roof killing unsuspected enemies, free from the shackles that was the turn based gameplay.

   I enjoyed my time with RONIN but I wouldn't play it again, ever. It feels like it could have been of one of those amazing hidden indie gems, if only the developer would have put a little bit of time to polish all the things they half assed, or at the very least spent some more time playtesting their own game. I saw on the forums that the game was on early access at one point? That confuses me to no end because unless the dev released a demo and then made the rest of the game through early access this doesn't feel like something that went through a lot of development after the base completion and release.

I also want to mention New Game + (didn't know in which category to put it, combat got a little long), the story and the artwork (too short to make it it's own category). NG+ it's pretty much the same as the first playthrough. There's one enemy that gets an upgrade, making him a bit more deadly (or frustrating, however you want to call it), and other than that I didn't notice any other major change. The story is almost non existent, since every mission it's "do some hacking", and you get a couple of phrases thrown at you at the start of the game and at the start of the some missions. I like the artstyle and animations are nice and smooth but it also feels like a regular flash game, not a game sold on steam for 13 bucks, but I guess that comes down to preference.