Hands On With Human Head's Hack-N-Slash Viking Adventure
After 18 years in the drawer, Human Head Studios has dusted off its Viking-themed action adventure series Rune with a new open-world, hack-n-slash adventure.
Rather than pick up where the original game left off, Rune: Ragnarok picks up in the midst of the Nordic apocalypse. Legends foretell the fiery death of all the gods during Ragnarok, but the cataclysmic event is not playing out as believed. The hellscape has taken hold, lasting nearly a decade. Giants, dragons, and the undead lay waste to the Scandinavian countryside, but somehow amidst this chaos, Loki has fiendishly prevented the end of the world from occurring. Your job is to take down this trickster god and get the apocalypse back on track.
I ventured into this battle during a hands-on demo of the alpha build at GDC. The game is still very rough around the edges, but I still came away with a basic understanding of what to expect from this Viking adventure, which allows you to play single-player, cooperatively, or on PvP servers.
The first thing I noticed about Rune: Ragnarok is the frantic pace of battle. After breezing through a fairly basic character editor that allowed me to pledge allegiance to one of several Nordic gods or valkyries (each of which offers different skill traits), I took to the killing fields as an ax-wielding, tattooed Viking rocking a braided beard. Using the mouse and keyboard, the attacking controls are fairly simplistic and rather inexact given the third-person camera and lack of a lock on during attacks. Once you get close to an enemy the fights commonly devolve into a series of sloppy swings and misses from all the parties involved – don't expect the choreographed melee combat of a game like For Honor here. Scrolling the mouse wheel gives you quick access to a variety of weapons like swords, spears, and bows. A collection of hotbar commands gives you easy access to items like mead for health recovery, as well as the runes you may pick up along the way. My Viking was equipped with a berserker rune, as well as a health rune.
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