Runeyana Demo

It’s not easy to innovate a popular genre such as fantasy RPG, given the fact that there already are so many great universes that are hard to beat without some truly amazing ideas. However, gamers can be fine with the minimum amount of innovation as long as the experience is enjoyable enough, which is why so many simple JRPGs can flood the market at the same time.

Runeyana is a third-person action-adventure game with RPG gameplay mechanics, in which your goal is to help your character evolve throughout the story and say your piece in the grand scheme of things. As of right now, the game is still in Early Access, which means that it’s far from complete and it comes with many shortcomings. However, there’s something shiny underneath all those badly implemented mechanics.

To begin with, the game looks and feels like a cross between a basic MMO and a classic ARPG in the style of Sacred or Diablo, except that the game world is a tad smaller and more restricted somehow. It’s a bit of a bummer to see such limitations in a game that technically encourages exploration, but then again this may very well be just another Early Access problem.

The controls and the interface are just as annoying as well, especially when it comes to the way you interact with the character screen and how your character interacts with the world. Even the jumping animation is very crude, especially since there’s no way to control your character after he or she takes a leap. There’s crafting involved later on as well, so you can only imagine the frustration when you need to work with multiple items and interact with NPCs at the same time.

As for the graphics, you shouldn’t expect an awful lot in this regard either, but then again it’s not a very important part if the rest of the game is engaging enough. This is not usually a problem in RPGs, but there’s not an awful lot of interesting things to do at the moment. Hence, the graphic issues become more obvious when you are not actively engaged in the story or some kind of confrontation.

In the end, Runeyana might be something worthy to watch as it develops, but right now it has too many bugs and missing features to keep you engaged. There’s nothing clever or challenging about the combat, and that’s not good news in an action-oriented RPG.