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It was said that there was once a magical Talisman that protected the Dwarven people handed down from King to new King. The last King could not decide which of his four sons should inherit so he split the empire in four and gave them each a quarter of the Talisman. Sadly, all four brothers disappeared taking the Talisman with them. Tasked by the town Councilor to enter the nearby ruins to help heal the village you find a small piece of the Talisman leading to a grand quest.
Runic Rampage is an isometric action RPG with obvious mobile roots. Now mobile port is not necessarily a bad thing but some of the grindy mechanics and the imprecise control system probably needed a little more work.
The game is split into 4 acts each with 2 areas and a boss fight. Each area has a separate theme and needs to be completed three times to proceed. These areas are generated procedurally and each takes somewhere between 4-7 minutes with around 50-60 enemies. While each areas type is unique, the enemies are just reskins of 4-5 basic archetypes: basic melee, fast range, slow range and an oversized enemy. There is a lot of effort put into making these areas feel different though.
The control system is pretty simple and can be played equally well with a controller or keyboard and Mouse. Combinations are performed with only two keys and I can’t help but think a third key would have been useful to bind dodge to. All too frequently I was trying to dodge when the game performed a “heavy” combination instead. This got especially frustrating in the cave area where rocks constantly fell from the ceiling and dodging mid fight usually resulted in an attack of some kind. There is also a magic system in the form of pickups, burning, poisoning and the very useful freeze, these can also be upgraded into more powerful abilities.
Now the grind, each boss requires a certain number of talisman shards to open up. For the first two acts I had enough but in the third and fourth I have to repeat levels multiple time to get enough of at the end of level loot drop to open the boss fight. At the end of every successful level, you can choose 3 of the 6 items available as loot, cash, skill points, treasure chest or a cosmetic outfit item. The shards are in chests with other items that open with golden keys that drop at random in levels, though I was never short of keys so that didn’t add to the grind. Skill points can be spent on 4 categories: damage, defence, agility and money gathering. Cash can be spent to upgrade weapons and magical abilities and buy new weapons.
The 3D graphics are very decent with fun enemy design and heaps of glorious blood and guts. The story is also nicely told in a series of fantastic hand-drawn vignettes and the accompanying soundtrack is fantastic.
This is isn’t Torchlight, Van Helsing or Grim Dawn but it’s also clear that significant effort has been put into this game. It’s priced appropriately and a lot of fun can be had.
Thanks to the dev for providing a key for review!
