Runic Rampage - Action RPG

A dwarf, a hammer, and a missing rune stone

Runic Rampage's premise is exactly as much as an isometric brawler needs. Grimbard, last champion of a broken dwarven kingdom, sets out to recover the fragments of the rune stone that once protected his people, hacking through desert, forest, cave and frozen fortress along the way — four acts, each split into two procedurally-generated stages and a boss fight. Electrocosmos is the solo studio name of German developer Alexander Leps, who spent roughly five years on this before it shipped on Steam in May 2017 as his first release. The narration stays out of the way; the game's argument is made with the hammer, not the dialogue box.

The combat carries it — and occasionally trips over itself

The reason Runic Rampage still pulls in "surprisingly fun" reviews nine years after release is its melee: fatal combos, a knockback-and-collision system where enemies can be smashed into each other, and a handful of spells layered on top of the swing-and-dodge loop. One reviewer, comparing it directly to a AAA release, writes that they "wish Diablo 3 could offer controller support like this" — and the full controller support, on a game this cheap, is a genuine point in its favour.

The friction shows up in the same place across a striking number of independent reviews: attack commitment. Strikes continue for a beat after the player releases the button, which reads as input lag even when it technically isn't, and there is no lock-on to fix the game's habit of aiming a swing at the nearest breakable door or barrel instead of the enemy standing next to it. None of that breaks the game — it's still winnable, still often described as satisfying — but it's the kind of rough edge a second pair of hands in QA tends to catch, and its absence is the clearest fingerprint of a one-person team.

Four acts, reshuffled each time

Progression is straightforward RPG furniture: levels, skill points, loot drops, and procedurally regenerated stage layouts so the same act doesn't look identical on a second pass. It mostly works, with two recurring caveats from players. Armour pieces, several reviewers note, change how Grimbard looks and not much else — the actual power comes from weapons and skill points, which makes gearing feel thinner than the loot drops suggest. And skill points hit a hard cap partway through the campaign, even as more keep dropping, which reads to some players as a soft difficulty wall rather than a design choice. The random map generator also has a known rough edge: a small number of reviews report scenery — a tree, a rock — spawning squarely in a chokepoint with no way around it, which for a paid single-player game is the kind of bug that should have been caught before launch.

No co-op, despite the neighbourhood it lives in

Dungeon-crawling ARPGs with a hack-and-slash focus and procedurally generated levels usually ship with some flavour of co-op — it's practically genre convention, from Diablo's online parties down to budget indies that bolt on local split-screen. Runic Rampage doesn't. Steam's own category list for the game shows single-player and full controller support, nothing more; there is no local or online multiplayer mode of any kind. It's worth being explicit about this up front, because the game invites the comparison to Diablo, Torchlight and — per more than one reviewer, reaching for an older touchstone — Gauntlet Legends and Golden Axe, all without matching the genre's most common shared-screen appeal. What's on offer here is a solo campaign, full stop, and it should be bought as one.

There's a secondary myth worth correcting too: a cluster of negative reviews describe the controls as feeling like "an obviously mobile port," blaming clunkiness on a phone-first design. The timeline runs the other way. Runic Rampage shipped on Steam in May 2017; the mobile edition, published through Crescent Moon Games, wasn't announced until that September. Whatever is causing the control friction, it isn't a downgrade from touchscreen design — it was built for mouse, keyboard and controller first, and the mobile version came after.

Nine years of Very Positive, with a clear grind wall

Steam's user-review verdict has held at "Very Positive" for nearly a decade: 95 of 109 reviews are thumbs-up, an 87% positive rate that includes reviews from launch year and reviews from the past few months alike, which is a reasonable proxy for a game that has aged fine rather than one riding launch-week goodwill. The achievement completion curve tells a matching story about how far most players actually go. Early-game achievements for reaching the second act or hitting a basic combo count sit in the 40–65% range; the streak-based achievements, which demand sustained hit or kill chains, bottom out under 5%. That's a normal shape for a linear ARPG — most owners finish or nearly finish the story, and only a committed minority chase the harder optional challenges — and it lines up with reviewers who report finishing the campaign in five to nine hours and treating full completion as a separate, much longer grind.

Verdict

Runic Rampage is a competent, occasionally clumsy budget ARPG that punches above its price without quite escaping the shadow of the much bigger games it's compared to. The combo system, the boss fights and the controller support earn it a loyal following nine years on; the attack-commitment and target-priority issues, the cosmetic-only armour, and the total absence of co-op keep it a tier below the games it invites comparison to. At ten dollars, or less on sale, for six-plus hours of dwarf-hammer brawling, that's still a fair trade — just go in knowing exactly what you're buying, and what you're not.