About This Game Runers is a top-down rogue-like dungeon shooter where you explore a vast underground labyrinth and face fierce monsters and bosses. As the game advances further into the dungeon, you will gather Runes, which will be used to combine into 285 unique spells. Discovering new spells will unlock their entries in your Runedex; unlock them all! But be careful – if you die, your playthrough is finished. We wanted to make a game that had a lot of replayability, customization, and discovery. Almost every design choice we made focused on furthering those three goals. We want the player to be able to choose the playing style that suits them: long range sniper, mid range run and gun, or an up close brawler. There are many features to facilitate this level of customization. When you earn enough experience you will level up and be able to choose from 4 random traits to make you even stronger. Each floor is procedurally generated, so the enemies, rooms, event rooms, and bosses you face are all randomly chosen, making every playthrough different. You will not encounter everything in the game in one playthrough, or even five: there is always something new to encounter.Each floor and room is completely randomized – each run will be a different experience Choose from 20 Races and 20 Classes to customize your runsRunes have unique stats that modify the spells you create with them Choose from 285 different spells to build your own unique spell loadoutsUpgrade your spells to make them even stronger50 different traits to choose from when leveling up 10 procedurally generated floors to explore and fight through 15+ random bosses and 100+ random enemies to fightNumerous Challenges, Event Rooms, and Achievements to completeDefeating enemies unlocks entries in your Beastiary5 difficulties to increase the challenge b4d347fde0 Title: RunersGenre: Indie, RPGDeveloper:LGK GamesPublisher:MastertronicRelease Date: 2 Sep, 2014 Runers Torrent Full A unique and ambitious concept paired with the top-down shooter genre. This is a game that I deeply want to like but cannot due to myriad poor design choices that pull the whole game down.I agree with the bulk of what is expressed in other positive\/negative comments so I'll try not to repeat those and just add my flavor.- Ludicrous design choices like the doesnt-make-an-ounce-of-sense control scheme- Random... so effing random. Yes we need random in games, but balanced random- Atrocious shooting and enemy sounds. Primaries on auto-fire should play a melodic and quiet harmony, not an ear-piercing squeal with every bullet that flies (5+ per second!)- Clunky and non-intuitive spell crafting, odd since this is the game's entire hook and premise- Physics-based bonus mini games where the physics pretty much don't work given the game's control scheme- Why so zoomed out - the hero\/foes are the size of antsI hate this game. But I want to love it with all my heart.. Runers is an amazing combination of discovery and rogue-like gameplay. You use 1-3 of 10 different types of runes to create hundreds of spells. Of the 285 spells you can only discover a handful per run, and runs can take hours. In other words, this game's element of discovery can last hundreds of hours. The spells are incredibly unique and versatile. You'll find that they fit into general categories and serve similar purposes, but that no two spells are the same. You can also upgrade the spells you have created by using additional runes on them. This doesn't simply upgrade damage or cooldown time though, but any of a number of aspects of a spell including but not limited to: buff duration, radius, force, speed, knockback, stun duration, and even "leash elastic." Clearly not all spells will have every one of these and more aspects, but how a spell can be upgraded is just as important as how it first appears.For me the best thing about this game is that it is a rogue-like with meaningful general progression. Usually in rogue-likes, once you die you start over and very little will have changed other than your knowledge of the game. In this game you might discover a very useful spell on one run and feel great about your progress even without winning or performing well.A really important thing to understand about the mechanics of this game is the meaning of "discovery." Creating a spell for the first time does not simply mean adding a new "recipe" to your runedex that you could have just looked up on a wiki. You need combiners to create spells for the first time, afterwards you can create those spells using only the required runes. Combiners have another possible use though, in that you can break them to gain experience. I can't stress enough how important it is to be aware of this aspect of the gameplay. If you look through the discussions you will find many, many people who didn't become aware of this until they had put many hours into the game.I definitely plan on completing my runedex so there's no way I couldn't recommend this game.I should also add that this game has a pretty cool soundtrack.. quite the fun game! still could use some tune ups here and there but for someone looking for a fast paced run and gun-ish experience its solid! the powers combination is what got me hooked (im hoping they make "combiners" a more frequent drop, only because it has felt like i crawl from floor to floor just hoping to find one) as of right now expect a solid gameplay but a barebones experience, this experience will be a nice addition to your rogue style games. A word of warning: I think the devs have pretty much disappeared several months back, so treat this game as frozen in its final state.They weren't kidding about the number of unique spells and the variety of classes & races available, and the game definitely has replayability thanks to the random generation of floors, and the different traits available on each level up. The RNG may be a bit too skewed against the player, especially in terms of rune drops, but personally I find it on par with BoI:R. Apart from the usual dungeon crawling, the tricky side challenges test your proficiency in using specific spells or fighting specific enemies.Admittedly the joy of discovery wanes once you earn all of the spells and encounter all of the enemies, but I reckon it'll be quite a long while before you reach that point. And a UX design gripe: there's no "quick restart" option like in many other rogue-likes\/rogue-lites, so you have to navigate from the starting menu again to select the same options as for the previous run if you want to.Still, I think it's worth getting this interesting time-killer, especially now that it's on sale. If you don't mind the once-in-a-while crash.. Runers has high hopes, and a fantastic spell crafting system, but is held back in just a few too many ways.The game is full of strange design decisions. For example rune combiners are needed only for new spells. This means that early on in your play of Runers you will find yourself unable to create many complex spells, and once you have died a few times and unlocked a lot of spells, you find yourself with combiners falling out of your pockets. My question is why? Surely the game would play better if combiners were always required but were more common? Then you'd have to be careful about which complex spells you created, and would make each run more varied.Then there's the fact that drops are completely random. I can kill an air mage and get an earth rune! There's no rhyme nor reason for anything, and as such each run tends to blur together.Sound levels are also just strange. Some enemies are much much louder than others. Some barely audible, others annoyingly loud. And this happens on every single 'I got hit', not just for special attacks or anything. Oh, also, your character doesn't have a 'I got hit' noise. That's rather important, and yet entirely missing. The music is really quiet. Again, this is odd because they sell a soundtrack edition, so clearly they're proud of it.You can rebind keys*. You will want to do this, since hitting 1-4 while using wsad to move is rather lethal. *Caveat: However, you can't rebind the left and right click spells. Which is odd, because they end up being the spells you click the least often, since they have an autofire option.The whole pace of the game is bloody fast. It's a test more of reaction speed than skill, most of the time. The main thing is movement speed. You move fast, your enemies move fast. So fast, in fact, that it's hard to control. The game suggests that you can use destructible objects as cover, but I genuinely had a hard time stopping behind them with any sense of consistency. It's that fast. I don't think this is a good thing, not at all.There can be a lot going on in fights, and you just don't have the time to comprehend it. After level three there's a miniboss, called the bombadier. He throws bombs. Makes sense, right? Except that he also throws fans of knives. And he also summons randomly spawning rocks throughout the room. And also there's at least four different types of bombs he spawns. Also he can run very fast, and spends most of his time off-screen while you're frantically trying to figure out if this bomb explodes in a + or an X, so you can't even throw incidental damage at him while dodging. And this is just a miniboss!Enemies can spawn in huge clusters right near the doors, giving you no time to react. If you get mobbed you're kind of in a spot. Unless you have a knockback spell equipped then you have to physics your way out of them. It's nice that you can push enemies around, but the game is so quick that often it's all you have time to do.When you level up, the game waits to tell you until after the fight. This is pretty great. It automatically pops up the box that gives you the choice of perk and you don't have to worry about getting mobbed the moment you click one. However, the game also doesn't let you click anything until it finishes playing the 'you levelled up' ditty. It just... stops for a moment.The spells. My goodness, the spells are so good. You can make one-, two- or three-element spells, with repeats allowed. The game tells me that's a total of 285 spells, and I believe it. You start off knowing all of the one-element spells, and I have crafted all of the two-element ones and a half-dozen of the threes, and they're very well varied. There's direct damage spells, aoe spells, buffs, debuffs, you name it.This is where the wonderful variety of statistics comes into play. You have damage and bullet speed and bullet duration and size and dot damage and knockback to name just a few that appear on spells, and then characters have movespeed and health and armour and elemental skill and crit chance and density and so many others that there is just a whole heap of room for spells to be different in! It's great!The game makes you feel like a pretty badass wizard, and I have to commend it for that. It's really fantastic in that respect. It's one of the best games I've ever played like that.Level design is good and varied. Each arena is different enough to feel interesting, and the enemies with zones of effect are just the right size to have an impact and let you play around.Enemy AI seems pretty smart. If you go invulnerable then they run away from you. They can try to dodge bullets, especially elites.Bosses are hugely varied, but, again, perhaps a little too busy. There is an awful lot going on in any boss fight, and it gets very hard to follow very quickly. This was my experience in the first boss I encountered: "Oh, so he's immune to damage? Okay, I'll wait it out. It's not ending. Oh, so I can stand on his head to hurt him. King of the hill, no problem. Okay, so those are knockback attacks bouncing around. Makes sense, this is the storm boss. Okay, so bouncing off the walls deals damage? or is it those red areas? Okay, so dodging is hard when his face covers the spells, but almost down to the last quarter and- oh. Dead. So he shoots lightning at the end, centred on his head, where I had to have been standing to damage him up until this point. Well that's good to know if I ever have to fight him again. Back to floor one again." And this hasn't been an isolated incident, this has happened with just about every boss. There's just no way of knowing what the attacks are going to do, or what hurts or where to stand. There's no telegraphing.I encountered a fair number of bugs, but the devs seem to be working on most of them. It's a small team, so this is entirely understandable and I don't hold it against them.And now for the nail in the coffin. My final comment: The art is... There's no two ways about this: it's really bad.There is a grand total of one, yes: one, casting animation. In a game about casting spells. A firepit is a reddish smudge, a mudslide is a brownish smudge, ice is, you guessed it, a bluish smudge. An air elemental, a creature, is a whitish smudge Every other creature in the game is done in pixel art, but not the air elementals. This is probably my biggest gripe with the game. I think that hiring a professional artist could double, perhaps even triple the quality of the game.Now you could argue that it's going for a "retro pixel style", but that doesn't stop it from being a terrible example of such. The only animations that you ever see are: walking in the four cardinal directions, walking while shooting in four cardinal directions. And notice that that's the direction you're shooting. The animation's the same no matter which way you're going if you're shooting, say, to the right. That's it, that's all there is. And it's not even a particularly good walk animation, just leg up, leg down. Standing still is even just a still frame from the walk animation, as far as I can tell.So, the verdict. Is it worth your money? Not at the moment. Perhaps after a few patches, and preferably a makeover, then I could recommend it, but not as it currently stands.I will edit this review if anything changes.. Experience with dev support and suggestions on how to resolve technical issues with the game made me change my stance here.While the frantic pace of some of the rooms in this roguelike can be difficult to deal with, especially with the lack of rune combiners early on, the game is still pretty fun and the spell creation/discovery mechanic is something that I enjoy greatly.Certainly worth sinking a bit of time into.. Below you'll find a very in-deph, analytical video review of Runers, and below that a review in written form, should you prefer text over video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0b1yF0mgHsAsthetics: Decent pixel art style that seems rather generic due to low variety. Especially the floor, the walls and the spelly icons look particularly bad. The spell effects themselves are rather pretty though. Very simple, no doubt about it, however this simplicity also allows for easier recognition (as enemies use the same spells).Sound design: Overall average. The sound effects are again generic, but what you would expect. Water drops create satisfying splash sounds, lightning sparks like broken electricity and fire spews crackling sounds of a train running on charcoal. A gripe worth mentioning here is the forgetable music, which ranges from alien space tunes while fighting in old ruins (huh?) to base heavy tunes in the depths of hell. Luckily the game does have a seperate music switch to turn off the music and play a choice of your own music in the background. I highly recommend playing heavy rock or metal, as I found it most fun to slaughter monsters alongside.Gameplay: The heart of Runers and by far the strongest component that carries the game. Before starting a new run (due to the permadeath mechanic of roguelikes), you create a character based on one out of 20 classes and one out of 20 races, which influence how you try to develop your character. Afterwards you are dropped into a procedurally generated dungeon, where you face hordes of monsters with distinct abilities and strategies to defeat them. There are also several special rooms you can find. Certain rooms have an aura attached to them that randomly affects your (and the monsters!) stats, either by lowering them or by increasing them. There are challenge rooms that completely change the objective, for example protecting a portal or dodging fireballs. On some floors a boss awaits you. These fights are particularly interesting as most bosses require a special strategy to defeat. For a great example, please watch the video and the fight against the Air boss Nimbirrus.While defeating enemies, you will find an array of drops. Among them Runers, Double and Triple Combiners. The Runes can either be used on their own to upgrade an existing spell or in conjuction with a combiner to create an entirely new spell from a pool of 285 spells! After unlocking all double and a reasonable amount of triple spells, I can honestly say that a lot of spells play very differently and this whole spell crafting system adds a really fun layer of exploration ontop of the game. There are some weaker points in terms of gameplay too however. Completing a floor or reaching a level up rewards you with a choice of four possible upgrades, which can be runes, rune level, combiners or passive upgrades (the latter for level ups). As the passive upgrades are mere stat upgrades, completing a floor does not feel rewarding enough on itself.TL;DR: Overall, Runers is an honestly brilliant action roguelike with an incredibly in-depth spell crafting system and a huge variety. The small gripes I have in terms of asthetics, sound design and unrewarding level ups do not diminish my very positive opinion of Runers. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED if you are into roguelikes like Binding of Isaac, Our Darker Purpose or A Wizard's Lizard.
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Runers Torrent Full
Updated: Mar 1, 2020
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