It’s a painful truth that vikings are so often misrepresented in the  media. Often films will portray anything but a viking (ancient gauls, summering, normans) and call them vikings. But Rune doesn’t make that mistake.

Rune knows that vikings were a distinct culture rooted in war and tradition and above all else they demanded respect. Rune is probably the best viking game to date; sure the Lost Vikings has some great puzzles and was one of the earliest releases from Blizzard, but it ain’t got nothing on Rune.

It’s a simple kind of game, you are a warrior and unsurprisingly you fight things. Yes, this is in fact an old school action game. It seems that third person action adventure games have lost something in the past couple of years, for lack of a better word I am inclined to call it focus. Every genre in every genre, action adventure games can’t be satisfied with action and adventure. They need to be RPGs,strategy games,dating sims and rhythm games all at once. When in the f@#! did that happen anyways? Genre crossover is fantastic but we lose sense of the word genre when these games forego focus in one for favour of satisfying all the others.

Gladly, Rune comes from a simpler time; The PS2 was just born; a 64 megabyte graphics card was something special and downloading at 512kps was a wonder. Rune is an action-adventure, straight up; you fight baddies, jump across platforms and solve puzzles a two year old could handle. That’s the game and Rune’s action focus is something special in today’s world of gaming. I miss this type of game and I hope it makes some sort of triumphant comeback and not just with the Prince of Persia series which seems to have been suffering a painfully long development cycle.

Rune is kinda like Quake with swords and axes, or Atlas that’s how they marketed it back in the day. Since then we have had a lot of great games do melee combat really well. Taleworld’s Mount & Blade came out just a few short years ago and gave us complete control over the way we swung, chopped or poked our fellow medieval knights to death. But if you can accept and enjoy an older game Rune will delight.