You are a big Viking with a big weapon. You chop stuff up. You bite the heads off little squirming lizards for a healing method a thousand times more inspired than stupid Nali healing fruit from Unreal could ever be. You’re on a quest for vengeance, pure and simple. Rune’s premise appeals to something simple, something carnal, something violent that, despite the preaching of politicians who would have you believe is a result of playing too much Minesweeper or Wolfenstein3D, is a deep-rooted part of human nature. And then, of course, when you get into the whole hack-and-slash thing, the jumping puzzles come. Ledge hanging more reminiscent of Tomb Raider or Mario64 does something to pull you away from the bloodlust frenzy the game so often alludes to and occasionally delivers. Overall, this is a very different game that introduces something new, yet lessens the effectiveness of the innovation by bludgeoning the gamer over the head with the same gameplay again and again throughout its many levels.

While storyline used to be completely negligible in first-person shooters, games like Half-Life and Deus Ex showed plot and gibbing need not always be parted. Rune is hardly an epic, but it does have scripted events and a basic underlying storyline. You are Ragnar, a promising young Viking who lives in a village full of friendly Viking NPCs. The game starts with a drawn-out narrative about some Norse mythology to provide the setup for the plot and then the camera pans down to show Ragnar’s rite of passage into adulthood. Control switches to the player and you’re free to roam the village and talk to the lively local personalities.

The town sequence is interrupted when a boat of a rival Viking clan is spotted sailing towards the village and a ship of Ragnar’s clan departs to meet it and see what’s going on. It turns out the other Viking tribe, hereafter known as "bad guys," have been getting into all sorts of evil Norse stuff like Loki-worshipping, and they use the dark side of the Force to blast Ragnar, his father and his friends to pieces. The boat sinks in an impressive burst of real-time lightning and all is lost until Odin, who has one of the crappiest smoke effects I’ve ever seen in a game, rescues Ragnar to seek revenge in his name. Little scripted events bump the game forward after that, but the quest is mainly the same. Enemies, both humanoid and otherwise, do communicate, set up interesting little traps and ambushes, and otherwise find ways to get on Ragnar’s Viking nerves through actions usually preceded by brief cutscenes or voice clips.

There are showdowns between rivals, dissension within the enemy ranks and an interesting little goblin gladiator arena, but overall such interruptions in the hack-and-slash feel like just that — interruptions. The Norse setting is certainly one rarely tapped and with much potential, and I swear that Rune’s version of the medkit, biting off a lizard’s head and tossing it to the side like an empty beer can, never loses its charm.

The graphics, while not startling by today’s standards, are well done. The use of colored lighting attains the perfect balance between faint ambiance and Unreal disco-spectacular, managing to be noticeable without being obnoxious. Environments vary greatly and little details, such as a still-twitching goblin pinned to the wall for bad-guy throwing-axe practice, spice up the more populated areas. One effect I found to look noticeably awful in comparison to the game’s general high graphic quality was anything involving fire or acidic breath or anything with flame-like qualities. When an enemy catches on fire, instead of being amused, you’re forced to grimace at the odd blockiness of the blaze. Some of the rune powers though, balance out this graphical blunder perfectly. Trails of light that come off of the Vampiric Blade move add a nice aesthetic that livens up the constant decapitate, jump, decapitate, jump rhythm the game establishes. And speaking of that rhythm, that’s really where my biggest complaint with the game comes.

I often find PC games to be far too short in single-player to justify a $50 purchase. Rune definitely has enough levels, but therein lies the problem. Combat feels extremely repetitive by the time you reach the halfway point of the game. The enemies, who on average have the AI of a mound of dirt, are seen over and over and over until you let out a sigh of relief when an enemy appears that isn’t just a re-textured version of an old one. Any major sense of immediacy or danger is lessened by the fact that climbing a ladder makes you basically invincible to anything in pursuit, but this is a trend long established by even games that boast excellent AI like Deus Ex, and I can’t really blame Human Head for it.

Some of the foes do have slight strategic elements, like the undead that require you to chop off their heads to kill them, and the plants seen in the beginning of the game that require a quick dispatching or else you’ll wind up either beaten over the head with your own weapon or swung around in circles and thrown to the ground. And there are sequences where large beasts called Wendols battle the enemy Vikings, bringing back the fun and strategic aspects of Half-Life’s multiple factions. The number of attacks you can do outside of the rune powers are very limited, and though each weapon has a different stance and posture, you’re basically doing the same action with it. Double and triple slashes/ bashes can be chained together with timing, and there is a sometimes-useful jumping attack, but it seems altogether unnecessary to dispatch the majority of your foes. There is a shield, utilized by the right mouse button, but I found the time it takes to stand and block is usually better utilized by just chopping the foe’s head off. It would probably have come in handy a lot more if there were more ranged enemies.

Furthermore, the jumping puzzles get very tedious at times, and there’s a lot of trying to guess exactly what the designers wanted you to do in order to find some switch to open the next door. The gameplay certainly isn’t bad; there’s just too much of the same to keep many gamers interested. Somehow I imagined Hell would be made up of endless jumping puzzles and monsters that come back to life 20 times before you kill them, and Rune confirms that guess by making its Hel level, and much of the rest of the game, chock full of all the painful conventions of Tomb Raider clones.

Fortunately, there are a few gameplay systems that break up the click-click-click monotony of using the same slashes or bashes over and over. The different weapon types, (axe, mace and sword), and the number of weapons of each type do allow you find a weapon best suited to killing a certain enemy. Every weapon in the game has some unique rune power that unleashes a usually impressive special attack while taxing a yellow meter that is replenished by runes scattered about. Some of these are definitely cool, like the Trial Pit Mace’s ring of fire or the Dwarven Work Hammer’s earth attack. And should you kill enough foes in a short period of time, a bloodlust bar can be maxed out, causing your eyes to glow red and you to be temporarily invincible. Another amusing little feature is the ability to pick up a defeated enemy’s head or limb and use it to dispatch more of the endless stream of foes.

The truth is, were the excellent control to be any less intuitive, the frustration factor from so much of the same would increase exponentially, but as is, the game merely falls into some of the same pitfalls that Diablo II had in single-player. Camera control is never a problem, and that’s usually a major hurdle to anyone making a third-person game with lots of jumps. Loading times are short and quickload times are near instantaneous, meaning the thousands of times that you will die, usually from missed jumps, are fairly painless.

Sound in the game is neither spectacular nor painful. The torturous screams in the Hel levels are a nice touch, but the game lacks the ambiance in sound of a lot of games out today, and the music adds a little tension during the few times it is present. The voice acting is fair, though it seems like it’s the same two or three voices throughout the entire game recycled over and over.

Level design wavers between inspired and recycled. Moments, like the earlier Hel levels where I was standing above a river of pure fire and making precarious jumps onto moving ledges, actually worked quite well to convey a sense of tension. The Viking fortress was also done fairly well, with a maze of buildings populated by enemies who would often be conversing or doing other things before you arrived. Others, like the caves before and after Hel, seemed to go on for way too long. In any case, almost every level has a sense of Mario meets Doom. I did run into an annoying bug of a door not opening in the fortress levels, but a small patch already available tackles that problem painlessly and without making your old save games unusable.

Multiplayer is, at this point, lacking, but that’s not entirely the fault of the developers. Although it seems like the net code could use some revision, as it has some of the problems the early Unreal code did, there’s also the issue of latency being more noticeable in a melee combat game. Weapons can be thrown as missiles of course, but the fact that you have to go retrieve your arsenal after chucking it at a fairly low speed makes this impractical. The rune power is usable and as cool as always, though some maps are entirely devoid of easily accessible rune power-ups. The deathmatch maps are perfectly specialized for melee combat, all maps either being small tight arena quarters just begging for a blood bath, or moderately-sized areas with only a few levels and every part being fairly easy to get to. And though right now there isn’t much as in the way of game type selection, Human Head has stated in interviews that they are going to work to support the mod community for Rune. The inclusion of an editor right out of the box definitely supports this claim.

Put simply, Rune is a solid game. The single-player is repetitive, yet so is the single-player of most FPS/Tomb Raider type games, and many gamers still find the motivation to finish them. It really comes down to whether or not the idea of hacking and slashing your way through level after level appeals to you. Rune is a unique take on things, focusing on third-person melee combat, and the charm of the Norse setting is present even down to the little details, like the spattering of blood all over Ragnar’s armor when he makes a few kills. If you’re an absolute hardcore action gamer who could find the drive to complete the extreme amount of levels in the original Unreal, Rune should fit your style nicely. Otherwise, you may want to download the demo first, and then imagine what that demo gameplay would be like stretched out over the 40-plus stages of the game. When so many games these days have too little, the complaint of too much is only a minor one. If you like the idea of fighting off Loki’s endless hordes with a bloodstained Viking Broadsword, there’s nowhere better to get your fix.