Runespell: Overture

Dealing damage - and, in most cases, taking damage - builds up your Rage meter, and it's here that the game's RPG elements come into play, since Rage can be spent on your load-out of Power Cards, which are a range of spells you slowly collect as you loot enemies and hand-in quests. Alongside perks that permanently boost your basic stats, you'll find several flavours of magic attacks (they're arranged along the lines of lightning, fire, weird creepers and that sort of thing), shield buffs, spells that extend the number of turns you can take, and others that empty out your enemy's Rage meter or lock their cards. You'll need to top up most spells in the shop between battles, unless they come in the form of ally cards, in which case they just come with hefty cooldowns.

Power Cards add another layer of complexity to the game, as you're essentially managing two meters rather than one, but it's still a rather basic system. Special attacks are handy, but feel a little weightless; the debuffs aren't vicious enough to encourage their use, and shield moves are never the kind of thing to get particularly excited by. It's this pared-down approach to systems that makes Runespell so easy to get into, but it also means the game can get dull fairly quickly - even for that mythical casual audience it has presumably been built for.

Worse yet, the bare-bones design permeates to every level of the game. The map is small and lacking in side-quests (it's also cramped and annoying to navigate); the quests you are given only differ in whom they send you to fight; and the poker system has been robbed of most of its depth from the outset.

This is a game where the value of your cards really doesn't matter unless you're building a royal flush. One pair is as good as any other pair, even if it's twos against aces, and that means that there are few deeper strategies to learn as you head further into the game. It's not making things easier to understand, because your brain will automatically seek to prioritise your cards from the outset anyway: that's what you do in poker. Instead, it's just taking away interesting options, and with a puny campaign and no multiplayer - yet, at least; apparently the team is working on it - interesting options were already in short supply.

As is often the case with puzzle RPGs, I still had a fairly pleasant time clicking through Runespell. I just didn't have a particularly involving time. It falls short of both the sheer bulk of Puzzle Quest and the sustained elegance of Gyromancer, and it's neither a tactical game of poker nor an entirely convincing RPG. What's needed, I suspect, are two things: a little more depth for some promising systems, and a little more trust that players can handle it.