YMMV / Rune

• Complete Monster: Conrack is a traitor to the Vikings, murdering 40 of them with only the hero Ragnar surviving. Allying with Loki, Conrack conducts raids that send countless dead innocents to the realm of Hel to become slaves in Loki's legions so the God of Mischief may escape an bring about Ragnarök to destroy the world. Turning on his own second, Sigurd, for his conscience and having him killed, Conrack later attempts to wipe out Ragnar's home village as punishment for his interference.
• Demonic Spiders: The Sarks in late stages of the game, which are basically the zombies you fought back in Hel except these monsters on steroids and even more pissed off than before. They tower your character, attack in groups, take a legendary amount of punishment, and some of them carry weapons that are bigger than your body, especially on Hard where they hit even harder and take less damage from your attacks. The amount of pain they can dish out can range from brutal at best to one-hit kill at worst if they manage to decapitate you. If you either lack maneuverability or didn't have your Rune Power meter charged to use your weapons' powers before fighting a group of Sarks, consider yourself boned. On the plus side, Sarks can be killed through conventional means unlike Zombies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The protagonist Ragnar bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dragonborn from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (another game with a setting inspired by Norse mythology), down to wearing a horned helmet that resembles an iron helmet from Skyrim. Even funnier is that there is a song in Skyrim titled "Ragnar the Red".
• Spiritual Successor: Rune is very similar to Heretic II in terms of gameplay, which was developed by Human Head Studios is made up of much of the original team that worked on Heretic and Hexen for Raven Software, but the former has more of an emphasis on melee combat.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: After the prologue/tutorial, the first hour or so of the game consists of platforming through a rather dreary cavern while fighting various Goddamn Bats. You don't start getting proper sword vs sword fights until you get to Hel, and don't fight enemy vikings until almost halfway through the game. The PlayStation 2 version and the Rune Classic re-release does mitigate this somewhat by introducing new Skeleton and Hellhound enemies to fight in the Hel portion of the game.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The engine changes made in Rune Classic has driven some players to hunt down the older versions of the game. Despite featuring enemies from the PlayStation 2 version, and the cut and removed levels are negligible as a mod can restore them to their original forms, Rune Classic forces players to use an outdated Direct3D renderer and does not support third-party ones such as the DirectX 10 and OpenGL renderers. The Direct3D renderer used by Rune Classic lacks many of the advanced features the other renderers offers such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and does not function properly on modern Windows operating systems. GOG.com adopters can download Rune Gold with the purchase of Rune Classic, but Steam users don't get this luxury. Alternatively, one can set up dgVoodoo 2 to wrap the outdated DirectDraw renderer into DirectX 11/12 to get similar benefits on Rune Classic.

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