Runers Review (PC)

Runers is a top-down real-time roguelike that attempts to mash together several different types of mechanics and offer a slightly different kind of experience from regular entries in the genre.

In a nutshell, it's the same old ode to the random number generator gods that roguelikes have always been. You depend entirely on luck in order to make your way through the world, which makes as much sense as the countless spleenless and hooveless boars populating the fields of Azeroth in World of Warcraft.

But Runers does a couple of things differently, and it does them pretty well, or at least well enough to maintain your interest even after your tenth attempt at not dying in less than ten minutes.

Gameplay

From the get go, you pick a race and a class, so to say, offering you a passive effect and an active one, ranging from a short teleport, becoming temporarily invulnerable or reflecting attacks, to charging for a few seconds and then unleashing a flurry of arrows or charging in and delivering a forceful blow.

In addition to this, you'll also choose your bread and butter spell, from a series of basic elemental attacks with various speeds, ranges and damage thresholds.

As you progress through the game and clear rooms and challenges and gain experience, you will be able to pick out random assortments of bonuses, from magical runes to bigger projectiles and other such stuff.

The shape of the rooms and the quantity or quality of their inhabitants are completely random, so some areas will only have loot crates, while in others you'll play Nascar while shooting at a swarm of assorted enemies chasing after you.

Things are getting serious

As you nonchalantly kill skeletons, rats, mages and the other denizens of the dungeon, you'll occasionally get loot drops, in the form of various magical runes.

The rune system is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Runers, and most likely the reasoning behind its title. You can mix and match up to two or three different basic runes, discovering a wealth of spells (over 250 currently) to be used during your adventures.

You have various types of projectile-based attacks, from very fast ones that do little damage but have a bigger chance to hit mobile targets to meteor-type ones where you have to lead your target in order to get a hit and a lot of stuff in-between.

In addition to this, you also have spells that buff other spells, increasing various rune levels, enhancing your offensive arsenal or giving you the ability to push enemies back, which comes in handy when you find yourself swarmed.

From fire blasts to poison clouds to chaos bolts that you can't really aim (but that also hit pretty hard), you'll find a lot of spell to fling while running for your life in the dungeon.

Of course, many of them will prove to be completely useless, in the beginning at least, and most of the time you won't get the ones you like or won't be able to combine them due to the lack of combiners, which makes the whole experience seem like trying to catch flies with chopsticks.

Time to craft some new spells

Sure, Mr. Miyagi did it in Karate Kid, but this isn't the kind of game where you have the time to trick naïve white boys into cleaning up your place. You're a vampire knight on a mission, or a genie barbarian looking to kill stuff as fast as possible, while keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for good rune drops.

In addition to this, the game's bestiary and runedex also provide you with the knowledge base necessary to improve your game for subsequent runs.

Developer Let's Get Kraken Games was certainly on the right track with this. As a role-playing game fan, the only thing I would have liked to be added would have been some structure. I'm not a masochist and when someone tells me to jump face-first into a wall, I don't do it over and over again in the hope that I will achieve some elusive cathartic state in the unlikely event that the wall finally crumbles.

So a little bit of user experience design would have been great, like ensuring that you get a certain number of runes and combiners after clearing a set number of rooms, or that you can transmute useless runes into the ones you want and so on and so forth, instead of being constrained to using the same silex axe you start the game with due to random chance.

If you put random rooms that just randomly kill you 90 percent of the time without you standing a chance to get away in Call of Duty or Dragon Age, you would see a lot of complaints. I don't see why it should be any different with roguelikes in 2014.

There are other games I'd like to play out there, so please ensure that I stand a chance to win if I play well enough. I want to live the story of the skillful survivor, or at least strive for that, not the ones of the hundreds of casualties and the one lucky bloke who got away because he was on a bathroom break.

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Sound and Visuals

The pixelated visuals are a blast from the past, but they're in high enough resolution so that they're enjoyable, and given the constant movement involved in playing Runers, that's a good thing.

Enemies are easy to tell apart, making pretty much every type you'll encounter easily distinguishable, so you know what you're up against.

There are also a ton of particle effects for spells, explosions and other items from Michael Bay's repertoire, but overall the art direction seems somewhat lacking, especially since the enemy designs seem pretty basic.

More visual variety and more vivid colors would have greatly enhanced the experience, especially when it comes to the level layout and general aesthetic.

More detail and polish, especially when it comes to animations and visual effects, would have also made the game stand out more. This way, it seems a tad generic, and you end up feeling as if you're doing the same thing over and over again, instead of undertaking a wondrous journey of discovery.

The music and sounds are similarly functional, with cues whenever something of note happens and appropriate feedback for your actions, but nothing too exciting or impressive.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion