Rune pulls the player into an imaginary world where the young warrior Ragnar has now been granted the great honor of officially becoming a man in his village. Ragnar is sworn to protect his village and the magically enchanted, highly sacred runes that it are located within it. Soon after completing his final test against the village’s toughest fighter, however, word comes that a nearby village is under attack and their runes are in danger of being captured. Ragnar suits up and sets out with the rest of the village’s toughest to aid in the neighboring village’s battle. Once they arrive, though, they encounter Conrack, an evil disciple and follower of the god Loki. Once an ally of Ragnar’s village, Conrack has now turned to the dark side, and proceeds destroys the ship that Ragnar and the others are traveling in, and everyone is killed – except for Ragnar. Given a second change at live and revenge thanks to the god Odin, Ragnar sets out on a quest that will lead him through the very depths of hell itself.

There’s no question: Rune is the most visually impressive title to come out of the Unreal Tournament engine yet. The environments that Human Head has developed for Ragnar to explore are massive, filling the entire screen with some of the most impressive architecture to ever grace a PC monitor. Kicking Rune into a high resolution in 32-bit color mode with all the trimmings turned on high, Rune turns into a visual feat for the eyes. Human Head’s artists have done an admirable job of creating fantastic looking textures that adorn the world of Rune, and it brings it to life like no other game has. There is a price to pay for the game looking so beautiful, however; ever piece of hardware on your computer needs to be absolutely pushed to the max in order to run the game with a high resolution and all the nifty visual options turned on.

Running Rune off of an AMD Athlon 900Mhz with 288MB of RAM and a 32MB GeForce II card, Rune was unable to run at a decent frame rate without turning down some of the options. Considering that this is practically the absolute top of the line available today, it was surprising that I had to pull down the World Texture option to Medium, throw the resolution to 800x600 and color to 16-bit, and even then the frame rate would run into problems when heading into a particularly large area. The water areas tend to be the worst, as there were instances where the game became a complete slide show, and was unplayable. It basically came down to smacking the mouse button and hoping that the enemies were dead when the frame rate stabilized. And while the Unreal Tournament engine significantly improved Direct3D support over the Unreal engine, it’s likely that some of the problems can be associated to that.

Gamers used to futuristic worlds where projectile weapons are the norm will be in for a bit of a gameplay shock when they start handling Rune. Other than a few special powers that extend a few virtual feet forward, all the weapons that Ragnar will pick up in Rune are entirely melee-based. You have swords, axes, clubs, maces, hammers, heads of the deceased, arms from chopped up goblins – Rune is full of weapons to use, but none of them will allow you take out enemies from afar. No camping allowed in this game; you need to get up and close in order to take out the enemies standing in Ragnar's path.

It’s a nice change of pace, and adds quite a bit of strategy to the game; there are certain weapons that work better on a type of enemy than others. For example, the skeleton zombies’ heads need to be chopped off before they stop attacking, or else they simply regenerate themselves. Almost any of the weapons that Ragnar has obtained up to this point will work on the creatures, but pulling out the Roman Sword will make short work of them. Experimentation is the best policy; each enemy has a certain weakness to a weapon that can make fighting them much easier. And most of the time weapons will not be mysteriously sitting on the ground for no reason, Ragnar has to kill an enemy for them to drop the weapon, and then he can pick it up and use it for his purposes. In addition, there are also a variety of shields that Ragnar can use to defend himself, but each has a limited amount of power before they break and a new one has to be obtained.

Shoving in a dose of fantasy are the the mystical runes. Throughout his journeys, pieces of these runes will be scattered across the ground. Picking the runes up will fill up the rune power bar located on the bottom right hand corner of the screen. On the meter is a little mark that indicates how much rune power needs to be allocated before the weapon in hand can be enhanced with a special power. Each weapon has a separate rune power level, with the higher requirement resulting in the more powerful special enhancement. The improvements to the weapons can include the weapon spinning around rapidly for extremely quick and potent hits, being ignited in flames to hit the opponent with a normal attack plus igniting them on fire and even lightning bolts that scatter around the room as the weapon is swung.

There are also other kinds of runes that can be collected that have special powers their own, such as bloodlust, which instantly puts Ragnar into a fit of rage. His eyes shine a dark red, and he’s able to take more damage without losing any health and deal much more damage than normal. The bloodlust power can also be enabled a second way by the horizontal bar in the middle of the screen at the bottom becoming full of the red bar. The red bar increases each time that Ragnar pulls of a successful attack, but if he doesn’t attack again within a few moments of the previous attack, the red bar will begin to slowly dwindle down.

Given that Rune uses the engine that Unreal Tournament utilized, primarily a multiplayer game, it is only natural that Rune includes multiplayer. And thus, of coures, Human Head has done so. It’s unfortunate, however, that more time wasn’t spent expanding the multiplayer experience for Rune; the interesting nature of the game lends itself to a new type of multiplayer that can’t be found in the most popular online genre, first person shooters. Out of the box, all that’s included is normal deathmatch and team deathmatch. Human Head has developed decent multiplayer maps to join up on, but wouldn’t it have been cool for there to be a one-on-one mode where players were given a shield and weapon of their choice and then left to duel in a Gladiator-esque arena? There is a map that allows the possibility, but it’s limited in scope. When Rune releases to the masses and people are allowed to create modifications could be some great additions made, but as it stands, multiplayer is entertaining only because of the focus on melee weapons, which while is a great twist, it can only go so far.

One of the problems with Ritual Entertainment’s Heavy Metal FAKK2 was that the platforming elements ended up being too frustrating for their own good because they were too hard to execute using a keyboard and mouse control scheme. Rune is a better in this respect, but there were many occasions where instead of having trouble making it through a section because of a puzzle or set of enemies, it was because I kept trying to make a jump to another platform. A word of caution: whenever jumping onto a rope to climb up on, make sure to quick save prior to making the leap; it seems that even if Ragnar entirely touches the rope, only half of the time does he actually grab hold of it.

No matter how great a game might be, there is always one part of development that is unfortunately overlooked sometimes, and can bring the game down considerably: bugs and glitches. It’s obvious that Rune was rushed into stores for whatever reason, and while during my travels I only ran into a few minor problems (sound effects suddenly becoming extremely loud and then extremely soft for no reason), others have reported enemies having no textures on them; places where if you accidentally kill a certain enemy, he can’t trigger an event to move the game forward; and the always fun crashing out to desktop and random freezing. Fortunately, however, Human Head is aware of the problems, and working around the clock to fix them in subsequent patches (one patch has already been released).

Human Head might not have a real name for itself yet, but Rune will definitely put them smack dab on the map. The Unreal Tournament engine has been enhanced in a number of ways to provide a surreal Viking-inspired experience that turns itself into is a somewhat simple hack 'n slash action game, but a very, very fun one, at that - and that's what it is important, in the end.