Rune II Review
Viking arts and crafts.
Rune II is the sequel to a nearly 20-year-old PC game and possibly most notable for one of the most awkward launches in a long while. This open-world Viking-themed action game mixes a horde of elements together to create a game that is fun for the right audience, but also a mess of issues. To make matters worse, the developer, Human Head Studios, announced they had dissolved the day after the game’s release without telling the game’s publisher, Ragnarok Game.
That’s a lot to ponder, but focusing purely on the game there’s a whole lot of hit and miss. Around these parts, there are some very fond memories of the original game’s multiplayer. The single-player game was perfectly workable, if forgettable, but bouts of deathmatch over a LAN were the highlight. Multiplayer consisted of hilariously goofy third-person battles where a huge part of the fun was knocking the limbs off your opponents across multilayered maps.
Mead served as the health potion and the sight of seeing an armless Viking somehow swilling it down to magically grow new limbs was just hilarious. Rune II is also heavily multiplayer-centric and has plenty of limb severing goodness. Multiplayer, however, is handled in a far more engrained way. There’s virtually no separation between the single and multiplayer campaign, except one is online. Otherwise, the cooperative four-player Viking fest is basically the same game.
To that end, players work together to battle the horde of monsters–ranging from vicious wildlife and human warriors to frost giants and the ever-looming threat of Loki, the game’s Big Bad. There’s a list of both PvE and PvP servers in the multiplayer menu, but available games were sparse and the overall stability of an online match was buggy as hell. It’s also confusing. When searching for a simple PvP deathmatch, I was still thrown into what seemed to be a PvE match and the game just stopped responding on the respawn map screen, forcing a reboot.
That said, a lot of otherwise weak or flawed games are just made inherently better when playing in a group and Rune II is no different. The main problem is one of focus. The relatively huge open-world map is far from convenient for the quick, much more intimate deathmatches that I so fondly remember about the original.
The other big issue is Rune II’s kitchen-sink approach. It’s not just a hack and slasher. For whatever reason, Human Head decided to add survival game mechanics. So, there’s building, resource gathering, cooking, and crafting. None of it is particularly complex or varied, though. Hack at trees to get wood. Hit rocks to get, well, rock. Kill animals to get their skins. Then forge weapons, armor, and other items.
Cooking stations let you create more effective food for healing and other effects. Weapons degrade at an alarming rate, so they must be repaired or replaced regularly. Each new area requires you to build (or repair) a longhouse as your base of operations and a place to weather through the deadly nights.
The problem is none of these elements really add much to the Viking action presented, except maybe providing some minor busy work. It’s not terrible, but if you really just wanted to be a badass Viking who runs around and kills things, it gets in the way.
Rune II tries to channel a lot of the most recent God of War and Ninja Theory’s Hellblade. There are stones spread across the landscape that relay the fascinating lore of the Norse mythology. Your guide and narrator, Heimdall, is a somber, dramatic fellow. Loki is a menacing force you’ll fight multiple times throughout the game, but the action has a tendency to get repetitive.
The fighting itself is kept pretty simple. You have a weak and strong attack, can jump and block, and have to be aware of your stamina level. Combat isn’t terrible, but does feel very basic. Indeed, it would have served the game far better had they focused almost entirely on making the combat feel as visceral and layered as possible (not unlike God of War) instead of adding all those survival game mechanics.
Rune II does look pretty, though. The scenery is fairly diverse and picturesque and many of the enemies are impressive to behold. The giants and other actual monsters look especially cool. Most of what you’ll be fighting are lesser things, like mindless human thralls and wolves. Despite being an open-world game, where you travel by boat from one region to another, the entire Norse world is really only populated by monsters, which is disappointing.
The lure of Rune II is largely in its atmosphere and Nordic themes. Norse mythology is a great setting for a game, packed with dense lore and fascinating stories and characters. Human Head clearly had a love for the subject matter and that does shine through here, making it worth a look for like-minded gamers. If you can find a small group of other players, it’s also a lot more fun to play cooperatively. Whether that’s enough to overcome the numerous flaws is up to you.
[Reviewed on PC]