Review: RUNE II: Decapitation Edition

Rune II Decapitation is an action RPG adventure game with an open world and PVP options developed by Studio 369 and published by Ragnarok game, LLC. It’s a Viking adventure where you travel around Midgard slashing your way through enemies, severing limbs left and right with blood everywhere. You can even use the limbs you cut off of your enemies as a weapon to kill their friends with. They claim it’s a must-play RPG, but do we agree?

We played RUNE II: Decapitation Edition for 5 hours on PC.

What we liked!

• Gods and skills: Heimdall revives you to stop Loki from unleashing Ragnarok upon Midgard! A God revived you to help him! I found it so cool that when you start, Heimdall is talking to you. His voice reminded me of Thor from Marvel, but Thor has his place in this game. When you level up, you get to the point of the game where you can choose the God you want to worship: Thor, Hel, Odin, or decide to go the rebel heretic path. After leveling to a certain level, you can pick your first skill. It doesn’t matter what God you chose; you can pick from all four skill trees. I picked everything with Hel because she is very cool in the movies I’ve seen. The skills in her tree are not that exciting at the start, but the passives are fantastic! The first passive you get, for example, is a Vampiric strike: your next attack will heal you for a certain amount. I loved playing with this, and it feels really powerful as well. I loved being in a story with gods, even one that speaks directly to me with excellent voice acting and all the skills I could get.
• Combat: The combat in this game is a lot of fun! You start by picking up a 1-handed sword and a shield. This is what I liked the most, so I played with this, almost my entire playthrough. You can left-click to swing your sword, right-click to block, press space to roll, and press CTRL for a heavy attack. However, the enemies can heavy attack and block as well. It would be best if you looked at your enemies to see what they are going to do. That means dodging the heavy attacks that go through your block and heavy attacking them when they are blocking. I found this a stimulating way to battle and had a lot of fun with it.

Somewhere between

• Fast traveling: You can fast travel around the world, yay! No need to swim for hours or keep crafting boats. However, you need a rune of teleport for this, and I don’t know about others, but I don’t see any way of making those. So, I used them up after dying to a boss quite far away from my main village, and then it was a lot of swimming. There are points where you can set your spawn point, and at some points, it’s just better to suicide because it will save you time to get to where you want to be. I don’t know what to think of this. Either I didn’t notice I can make those things, they didn’t explain it, or there is just no way, and you only get them as loot.

What we disliked

• Visuals and stutters: I was not too fond of the visuals overall. You might call me spoiled in the games I usually play, but this game looks old. It looks like it came out five years ago. I started my adventure in epic graphic settings, but even then, it just didn’t look right. I also had quite some stutters in the game, so I switched to mid graphic settings, which is the second-lowest option, but it didn’t fix my problems. After that, I went to the lowest settings and still stutters. I had real trouble with this during combat, and it made it more challenging than it should be. I have had this in no other games before with this PC, and I play many games. I don’t understand why this game is so hard on my PC compared to other games that look better.
• Terrible voice overs: There are only two people in the game that I’ve met that speak normally and how you expect them to. The rest sounds horrible. I don’t know how this made it through. I don’t skip quest intro’s or story parts often, but I couldn’t stand it in this game. It started so good with Heimdall speaking to you, and I got so hyped from that, but after that, it went downhill extremely fast.
• Variation: There is not a lot of variation in weapons you can craft. You get all the usual stuff, but why not give us more to enjoy? At least in the start, you can pick between 1-handed ax or 2-hand, mace, bow, shield, and sword. I know this seems like quite a lot, but there are only three options in one-handed weapons. Why not give us more enchantments? Like fire or ice, I found an icy sword, but I could not craft it. It was so cool (no pun intended) that I kept that sword until it barely did damage anymore. Or let your god bless your weapons with something special. Maybe this gets better later in the game, but I think this should be in the early game as well. So that I can grind for that shiny weapon I like.

CONCLUSION

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