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Rune is an Action Adventure/Hack&Slay game made by Human Head Studios and published by Gathering of Developers in 2000. It came out for the PC and Linux and one year later for PS2 and Mac OS

Rune uses the Unreal Engine 1 and it looks very nice. Sharp textures, the typical cool 3D skybox and even realtime shadows of character models.

I thought that Rune was a very nice action adventure. It is influenced a lot by the north mythology ofcourse, you are playing a viking and are in contact with Odin. He is helping you to stop Loki from starting "Ragnarok" which basically means the end of the world.

That alone is good because there are not many good games that have those Viking themes so it is something uniqe.

Rune has about 40 levels and some of the best level designs I have seen in those old games. It really gives you the feel of an epic quest that you are going through until you finally reach your nemesis and there is also a nice little "plot twist" at the very end of the game if you can call it like that but well I won't spoil it ofcourse.

The quest starts a bit lame at first because you are fighting through some caves, swimming around and kill crabs but don't give up so fast the game gets better after that (well except for the undead but don't get me started on this :P )

The weapons you get all have magic abilities that you can only use if you have enough runepower, I guess that is where the name of the game comes from. The system reminds me a bit of the Heretic 2 "Tome of Power" but while in Heretic 2 you only made your weapons stronger, in Rune all weapons have their own special ability.

Some make you invisible, others will give you a magic shield or you get a vampiric ability that gives you health back when you hit someone and so on.

But while there are a lot of weapons in the game, all of them are melee weapons. I actually wished that there was a bit more variety I mean a bow/crossbow or some traditional magic that you could use with the runes would have been good because all you basically do in this game is "Run to the enemy, slash, go to next enemy"

Which gets me to the main point of criticism on Rune: The combat system.

The problem is that I played Severance - BoD before Rune. Rune's combat system is non-existent because you just basically mash your attack button until your foe is dead. That is something that I was a bit disappointed from.
The game could have been much better with a well thought out combat system but instead it's just a button mash fest.

Would it have been that much of a problem for the developers to think atleast five minutes about implementing a combat system whatsoever? Guess so.

Rune also has a multiplayer part with typical deathmatch stuff. Nothing interesting but there is a coop mod made by the community which works pretty well. I just thought the difficulty was way over the top in the coop mod but maybe it can be changed somehow. The mod is hard to find though because after all those years most download links are dead.