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| Rune | // review |
| A few months ago at ECTS I managed to wangle my way in to see some of the titles on show on the Take 2 stand. In amongst everything else was a slash-em-up based on the Unreal Tournament engine called Rune, a game that showed a great amount of promise but that had almost entirely managed to bypass our radar screens. Well, it snuck up on me again last week, dropping through my front door on the first weekday after my much-needed holiday. While wondering how I was going to approach this review, playing what I thought was a preview copy of the game a couple of interesting facts came to light. Firstly, the game was already available in the US. No great surprise there, it's a fairly common occurrence, becoming more and more common as the Internet spreads news and information quicker than traditional mediums. Secondly, that it was being released in the UK on November 3. Yep. Two days ago (as of this writing) which means that if you want this game, it's on the shelves right now. So, What's it About? Vikings mostly. Or more accurately, one Viking name Ragnar, the character you play. At the beginning of the game you have just become a man and head off to battle with an evil warlord who is bent on taking over Midgard. Almost immediately, everyone gets killed - yourself included. Not much of a story really. Except that the Allfather Odin rescues you from death and sets you on a path to wreak vengeance for the death of your father, and coincidentally to stop Conrack from precipitating Ragnarok and freeing Loki, the evil one to lay waste to all the world. The game itself is pretty standard fare, although it is not primarily a first person game. Control is normally in the third person, although included is the ability to set the levels of 'zoom' from a comfortable view behind Ragnar to an 'in eyes' mode which is useful at times, although certainly not the primary choice for playing. Since the game is based on Norse legend, and the Vikings didn't have projectile weapons, you are limited to hand held weapons, and this is one area where the designers of Rune have excelled. Attack! Rune is probably best described as a hack-em-up. You start out with no weapons at all, quickly graduating to your first sword. using variations of control let you perform different manoeuvres with your weapon. You also have access to clubs and axes, and can carry a shield unless you are wielding one of the huge two-handed Viking war axes. Control of these items is simple, with the default left-mouse button being attack, and the default right-mouse button being defend - if you have a shield. Since the game is not based on projectile weapons, some other form of combat interaction is needed. Rune achieves this by introducing location type damage, allowing a judicious strike with a sword or axe to sever an arm or a head (which pops up into the air before bouncing on the ground...). You can even target your opponents shield arm, knocking their shield away leaving them open for a strike on the unprotected side. Obviously this also applies to you, and it can be most disconcerting in the middle of a battle to suddenly find yourself shield less. Should you find yourself without a weapon for whatever reason, you can kick quite effectively with your Viking size 11's, and for that extra gore factor you can even pick up and wield severed limbs or heads. And if you really really want projectile weapons, you can throw your weapon at the enemy, or limbs, or heads. You only get one shot though, so you'll have to retrieve your axe or club if you want to smite some more heads. This Barrel is Annoying Me Items in the world can also be interacted with in various ways. Barrels can be stood on or broken with a weapon for by kicking them. You can jump on the as well if you feel so inclined. Benches can be splintered and some doors and walls can be destroyed. Your character has been given a wider range of movements than is standard in Unreal Tournament, and you can now climb up low ledges, as well as climbing up and down ropes and chains. Health is distributed in the form of food, being fruit, meat, mead or lizards. Each type of food has an associated animation sequence, and watching Ragnar lift a tankard of Mead, drink it and then smash the tankard on the ground never gets tiring. Eating fruit leaves a trail or cores in your wake, and legs of meat add to the piles of bones in evidence throughout the game. There are also a very few health runes scattered around the levels, although these are very rare. I would have liked to have been able to pick up benches and chairs and use them as weapons, but perhaps that's taking the interactivity a little too far for a game like this. Enemies are well designed, animated and skinned, and have been scaled to allow for greater variation. The best use of this is the crab-like monster, which ranges in size from small 'squish them with your boots' to enormous beasts that require serious work to dispatch. One interesting thing with these monsters is that they are just the right height - in their mid-size incarnation - to provide a much need boost when trying to reach a high ledge, and I escaped one fight where I was about to be overwhelmed by leaping onto the back of one of the creatures and the up onto a ledge. Perhaps not entirely what was intended, but it worked to my advantage. HumanHead have spent a lot of time making sure the environment as a whole has a realistic feel. For example, when you brush against bushes and trees, they bend out of the way or rock from side to side, and toadstools release a green cloud of spores when you jump on or hit them. Welcome to the Real World. Sorry for the poor allusion - mixing futuristic sci-fi with Norse mythology is perhaps not the best way to start off a section... Anyway, the levels in Rune are enormous, well laid out, beautifully constructed and, best of all, make you think about where to go. The Rune single player game is not an RPG nor is it an adventure, so by it's nature each level is going to be essentially linear. The designers have gone to great lengths to ensure that you can easily follow the path, but that the path is not necessarily where you expect it to be. I won't give it away, but the first playable levels outside the village will give you pause for thought. There are often multiple paths through each level, although one way through may not open until you have completed a task or two. Backtracking is almost non-existent, and only on two occasions did I managed to get stuck in a situation that required loading an old save game. Mind you, both these issues have been addressed in the recently released Rune Patch - released the week before the game hit the shelves here in the UK. The different levels themselves can be very challenging at times, and with the introduction of more than just run, jump and climb ladders, getting around the various locations can be interesting to say the least, and they certainly make you think about what direction to go in. There have been a number of situations where I have been absolutely flummoxed as to which direction to take, but stopping for a minute, getting your bearings and thinking laterally usually solves the problem. Sometimes the path you have to take is a very difficult one, and sometimes it's a path that you ordinarily would shy away from or avoid altogether. "Have faith my son," Odin says at one point. Eye Candy Being driven by the Unreal Tournament engine, you would expect Rune to be a very pretty game and it certainly doesn't fail in this respect. As I said earlier the levels are enormous, and the texture artists have gone all out to avoid as much texture tiling as possible, whilst providing texture sets that are appropriate to the level you are playing, and the visual effects the game engine is capable of are used to the full. Some of the Hell levels (about a quarter the way through the game) have a particularly effective texture effect used to simulate lava flow - it's really quite hypnotic. Each section of the game is distinct in it's visual style, but unlike a lot of it's FPS style predecessors, Rune moves gradually between each area, using linking sections to make sure that getting from one part of the game to the next is logical and you don't suddenly - or magically - find yourself transported from one area to another. Rune has pretensions in several places to almost be an RPG, with some pseudo interaction with other characters in the game. Interaction though is limited to the NPC's speaking a few lines of dialogue at you that in a couple of instances help you decide where to go next. That really is about it though. Multiplayer Multiplayer you say? Well, yes, Rune has a multiplayer component. it would being based on the Unreal Tournament engine. I checked it out, not thinking there would be many Rune online servers anywhere nearby (in Internet terms) yet for me to play on. The best I found was running at around 170ms, but I was still able to play fairly well. Tactics pretty much get thrown out the window in Rune multiplayer. Whilst all the special moves, arms and armour all exist within the multiplayer framework, the time to put best use to the various combinations doesn't perhaps come across, at least at this early stage of the game's take-up. You can see from the three multiplayer screenshots I took that scoring is pretty easy, at least if you go in bashing the attack button and spinning like crazy. I managed to win the first two matches I ever played, although I'm not sure if that says anything about the game or my skills... There is the opportunity there for Rune multiplayer to be an enjoyable experience, although the third person viewpoint and control system leads to an interesting view of the combat. Heretic 2 was the first title to really exploit third-person multiplayer. This was a most interesting experience as you suddenly have to be aware of a lot more than what's immediately in front of you, as well as the fact that attacks are also effective to the side of your swing, as well as - to a lesser extent - behind you. I played just by attacking lots and running around, occasionally running away to get a new weapon or perhaps some food. The Lesser Runes I didn't bother with, although perhaps I should have. Conclusion Rune is a single player game, first and foremost. The experience as a whole is entirely enjoyable and has kept me coming back over and over to get just that little bit further before I shut down and go to sleep. At times I have played Rune to distraction, having to discipline myself just to write this review. I'm yet to finish it, and I hope I do before I have to give this review CD back. Perhaps I can swap it for a boxed version... | |
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