In attempt to put a dent in my backlog this year, I've played and reviewed a lot of really good and really bad games this year. However, this game is such a disaster that it's earned the title of "The Worst Game I've Ever Finished", dethroning the previous title holder released back in 2000. Realms of Ruin has terrible basic game design issues, limited/missing controls, minimal HUD information, and is still suffering from launch gameplay bugs while still receiving DLCs. Some bad games are fun to play as an oddity or to laugh at with friends (like Shaq Fu), but this is just bad bad. This game wants to be Dawn of War 2 with an Age of Sigmar skin, but it fails at properly implementing RTS game elements even from the 90s, never mind its inspiration. Unless you're really into painting AoS minis, this game has no redeeming value and should be avoided.

Let's get the most glaring gameplay issue out of the way: once any unit is engaged in melee combat, it cannot switch targets or reposition. The only way to break them out of combat is by issuing a retreat command like in DOW2, except you have to spend Control resources to do so. There's only two resources in the game for all factions, with Control being your basic "Gold" resource for buying all tiers of units, and Realmstone being used for unit abilities and advanced units. The cost to retreat also increases for higher tier units and costs are charged per unit; if a stack of units get stuck in, it might cost you half a building's worth of resources just to save them.

Not like it matters half the time though because regen from your home base is abysmal... It's usually better to just let low tier units die and repurchase them than wait several minutes for them to heal. Even if you can save units, pathfinding is terrible and is per character model; There were several missions where I was basically given -1 unit cap because a single entity was stuck on terrain and couldn't even be selected thanks to the retreat order. Game balance in general is frustrating because of the simplistic rock-paper-scissors balancing system and units getting stuck in. Early game this balancing doesn't matter much, but T2 shield units can easily tank several ranged units even while pinned down by another melee unit.

Other balancing issues plaguing the game include: home base upgrades (unit cap, unit tier) being cheaper than any other buildings, Arcane Conduit buildings having the normal control point buildings being split into four mutually exclusive buildings (damage, sight, regen, resources separated), and poor unit balancing with ballista and single entity monsters being obviously overpowered. Endgame battles seem to come down to who gets their unit abilities off first, followed by who can keep their ballistae protected. Of course, I only played through the campaign so I didn't have the intended E-Sports experience, but that would be hard to given the 28 concurrent players.

The campaign is 18 missions, jumping between all of the factions, and is riddled with poor game design choices. I could probably write a whole review about the issues with each mission... Mission 3 has you holding three control points to stop a ritual, but the bar starts almost full and the enemies get infinite free units from spawn camps around the map (like Gauntlet). Mission 4 has you intercepting an undead leader, but you have to build mission-specific towers that can only damage him, and then he "died" with 1/3rd health left anyway. Mission 17 was a special kind of nightmare, with a bug that prevented me from recruiting more units after the halfway point.

However, RTS campaigns are usually a warm-up, so how's the skirmish mode? It's absolutely barebones with only 1v1 and 2v2 maps with no team composition options. Where are Free For All, 3v3, and 4v4? Where are alternate victory conditions? DOW2's AI suffered from focusing on backdooring control points and this game suffers from that too... I don't see myself touching Skirmish mode, even if they improve the other issues with the game.

Realms of Ruin at its core feels like it was designed for mobile and upscaled to PC with minimal knowledge about how actual RTS games work. There's a serious lack of information and controls on the HUD: characters have health bars but no health numbers or percentages, units have no visible stats (despite upgrades providing stat bonuses), and units have no stance options. Attack-move was apparently added post-launch but it doesn't work well either; your units seem to only engage units directly in their marching path, regardless of their attack range, when in most games an attack-move would give them the freedom to attack anything they encounter in their vision (another thing fixable by stances). There's also almost no tooltips provided for the minimal HUD outside of the overpowered unit abilities... Good luck finding out what all those buffs and debuffs on units are and where they came from. Units can be thankfully grouped but there's no way to remove units from a group unless you completely remake the group. Lastly, the default controls are bad, but the camera controls are especially frustrating and there's no way to increase the panning speed with a key press (most isometric games use Shift for this).

If it was a movie on Best of the Worst, it'd be one of those generic monster movies where they get lost in the woods for half the movie, have a five minute big name actor cameo so they can put a famous name on the box, and use box art for the monster that doesn't match the monster's design in the movie. This game is a mess and isn't salvageable. Age of Sigmar is a hideous, Marvelized half-breed between Warhammer Fantasy and 40k, but reskinning this wouldn't do anything to fix the terrible gameplay. This is a slow-paced, poorly controlled mess that was designed to be watched and not played. The only positive things I can say about it are the graphics are okay and the cutscene animations and rigging are fantastic (I hope you guys can get better jobs). It's a travesty that Warhammer Fantasy died for this. A true abomination and a waste of money, both by myself and the developer's investors.