Ruined King: A League of Legends Story

Bilgewater, ten days after Arcane

Ruined King launched on 16 November 2021, ten days after Netflix's Arcane premiered and reframed how a mainstream audience thought about League of Legends as a setting worth taking seriously outside the arena. It's a useful coincidence for understanding what Riot was trying to build with its Riot Forge label at the time: a slate of standalone, single-player games set in League's world, handed to established studios rather than built in-house, aimed at proving the setting could carry genres the main game never touches. Ruined King, developed by Airship Syndicate — the studio behind Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, founded by former Vigil Games talent — is arguably the most ambitious of those bets: a full turn-based RPG built around six playable champions pulled from Bilgewater's pirate-and-sea-monster corner of the setting, chasing the source of a mist-borne curse threatening to swallow the region whole.

The Timeline

The reason this game earned real critical attention beyond its licence is its combat system. Every combatant's action — attack, ability, item use — is assigned a speed: fast, balanced or powerful, and that choice determines exactly where the action lands on a shared timeline shown on-screen for both sides to see and plan around. A fast attack lands sooner but hits softer; a powerful one lands later but harder; interrupting an enemy's turn before it resolves becomes a genuine tactical option rather than a fixed initiative order deciding who goes first. Layer in status effects, buffs and debuffs that shift position on that same timeline, and the result is a system reviewers consistently single out as the game's real accomplishment — not difficult in the punishing sense, several note the game is fairly forgiving overall, but deep enough to reward planning several turns ahead rather than just picking the biggest number every round.

A cast that plays it safe

Where Ruined King is more conventional is in how it writes the six champions carrying that combat system. Miss Fortune and Gangplank read as intuitive choices for a story centred on Bilgewater's criminal underworld, and the writers work to justify the rest of the roster's presence with reasonably sound in-fiction logic — but the character work itself, according to a real slice of the review corpus, doesn't go much deeper than a single defining trait per hero. The dialogue is enjoyable moment to moment and the voice cast delivers it well, but interactions are frequently described as one-note rather than building toward real growth across the story. For League of Legends players specifically, the lore payoff more than compensates — this is meaningfully more background on established champions than the arena game itself ever offers. For players coming in cold, it's a serviceable story riding on a genuinely excellent combat system, rather than a narrative that would stand out on its own. The bigger structural criticism several reviewers raise alongside the writing is pacing rather than tone — some fights run longer than their tactical payoff justifies, and a handful of side quests are reported to surface before the story has given the player enough context for them to land as intended, small friction points in an otherwise tightly directed campaign.

Bugs nobody is coming back to fix

The more consequential problem, years on from launch, is technical. A specific and repeated complaint in the Steam review corpus describes bugs serious enough that multiple reviewers recommend keeping several rotating save files rather than trusting one, with at least one detailed account of a quest item advertised as a guaranteed drop simply failing to appear. That would be a survivable launch-week complaint for most games, patched away within a few months. It's a permanent one here: Riot shut down the entire Riot Forge label in January 2024 as part of a 530-person layoff round, citing unsustainable development costs across its publishing slate, and Ruined King's remaining issues are now locked in place with no team left to address them. It's worth going in with that expectation set correctly — this is a finished, no-longer-supported piece of software, not a live game that will get better with time.

A studio that had already done this once

Airship Syndicate wasn't a new name to turn-based RPGs when Riot brought it on. The studio's previous release, Battle Chasers: Nightwar, was itself a turn-based RPG built on a comic-book license, and the design fingerprints carry over directly — a shared appetite for stylised, hand-painted presentation over photorealism, and combat systems built to reward planning rather than reflexes. That prior experience shows in how confidently Ruined King executes its own ideas: the Timeline system in particular reads like a studio that had already spent a full game learning what turn-based combat can do differently, rather than a team building the format from scratch under a big licence's pressure. It's part of why the combat holds up as the game's clear strength even where the writing plays it safer — this is a genre Airship Syndicate had already proven it understood before Riot Forge came calling, not a stretch assignment for a studio working outside its comfort zone.

Value

At NZ$44.95, Ruined King is priced like a mid-scale premium release, and the 89%-positive Steam score across more than 11,000 reviews suggests most buyers feel that's a fair trade for a tightly scoped RPG built around a genuinely novel combat idea. There's no ongoing monetisation to weigh against that either — cosmetic skin variants are the only add-on content, and the core game is complete and self-contained as shipped. The value question here isn't really about money; it's about whether a strong combat system and a well-painted world outweigh safe writing and a handful of bugs that are now permanent fixtures. For most of its audience, going by the numbers, the answer is yes.