What is Rune?

Rune is a 3D third person action adventure game (e.g.: Tomb Raider) in which you incarnate Ragnar, a Viking warrior.  Armed with a range of sharp weapons, such as axes, swords and hammers, you're on a quest to save the world and avenge your father.  You can climb ledges, run, jump, throw weapons or slash ennemies and eat various things on the way, such as apples, to replenish your life.

See also, the multiplayer-only expansion: Rune: Halls of Valhalla

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Imagine a game in which you can kill a goblin, then pick up his head and use it to smash another goblin. Imagine a game in which you can hack your way through armies of the undead, who wield a wide variety of nasty-looking sharp objects. Now imagine that said game is somehow monstrously, mind-bogglingly dull. You’ve conjured up a mental image of Rune.

Rune’s greatest problem is that hacking your way through armies of the undead sounds much more interesting than it is — in practice, a third-person shooter without any shooting turns into a long, tedious run through levels where you simply bash everything in your path. Rune’s dogged insistence on avoiding projectile weapons (beyond thrown hand-to-hand weapons) makes the apparently huge selection of 15 weapons feel more like 3... Ragnar (the Viking main character, who at least boasts an impressive-sounding name) can also pick up the heads and arms of mutilated opponents and use them as weapons, but we couldn’t find any real point to the body-parts-as-weapons concept (beyond simple style).

Rune suffers from having many more levels than it has plot to support. The result is a sense of drift — you’ll lose track of what precisely Ragnar is trying to achieve (beyond chopping his way through the inevitable armies of the undead, dwarves, crabs, giant coral polyps, and the rest). The game also has a few too many cut scenes that convey important plot points, such as “I’m tired of toying with you, Ragnar!” and “Human smell bad! Crush human!”

That said, the game becomes more compelling as it goes along. Once you suffer through the incredibly tedious underworld, the game tightens up dramatically — and develops a fine sense of humor we wish it had displayed earlier on (we particularly liked the hilariously overblown machines of the dwarves). Rune’s generally well executed puzzles give players a sense of accomplishment that the almost uniformly mediocre battles lack.

The game is based on a modified Unreal Tournament engine — but we can’t say much for the modifications. The game felt significantly more sluggish than Unreal Tournament does on the same hardware. Worse, Unreal Tournament is really a shooter, not a swordplay game — so if you’re expecting the complex parry-and-cut features some swordplay-based games provide, you’re in for a disappointment. You have exactly one attack button (apart from the ability to throw a weapon), so combat is nothing more than advance-slice-retreat, repeated about 200 times per level. Collecting runes, glowing relics scattered throughout the dungeon, lets you use a special attack that varies from weapon to weapon — but runes are available infrequently enough so thatyou don’t often get to do more than bash and slash. The game engine also includes a ghastly fog effect that results in giant cliffs appearing or disappearing at surprisingly close range.

The multiplayer game is particularly uninspired — it’s a throwback to the days when death matches were the be-all and end-all of multiplayer gaming. Some of the multiplayer maps are even of the awful arena-of-death format we’d hoped never to see again.

Rune left us with extremely mixed emotions. On the one hand, we often found it a tedious game, with far too little plot stretched across far too many levels. On the other hand, we can’t really complain about a game that delivered several days worth of gameplay without any serious crashes or instability. In the end, the game is more or less a tossup — if you’re a diehard fan of the third-person shooter, it might be worth a look.

Sammis, Ian. (April 2001). Rune. MacAddict. (pgs. 54-55).

Download Rune for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

Mac OS 8.6 - Mac OS 9.2.2

Requires a PowerMac with a 3D accelerator

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver