Runers is a rogue like twin stick shooter of sorts where you play some kind of spellcaster armed with runes that you can combine to make more powerful spells, it's a bit difficult for my tastes but I feel like it's a pretty good game, even though I've just scratched the surface. There are a few things here and there that could be made to make it easier but otherwise the arcade feel and the enemy variety combined with a great deal of information about your own abilities made me lose a few hours in this fun title.
The rune system is pretty cool, you have 10 elements and you can mix two or three of them to make a new spell. Some combinations are simple - like dual lightning - but some are buffs, debuffs or other effects entirely and you are encouraged to try them out, except that the drop rate for the dual combiners - an item you need to mix two runes - is quite low and I've never picked up the item to combine three of them during the time I've played, there should be a way to make these combiners, maybe by sacrificing a bunch of runes?
Before playing, you pick a race and a class, all races have special passive abilities that go from a 7% chance to fire twice whenever you attack or convoluted systems about getting stronger each time you explore a new room but having less stats overall. Classes have active skills like shooting arrows, casting your spells without cooldowns or summoning zombies, I have to say that there aren't many classes that I figured were useful, why not throw an healing ability or spell in there?
That's the main reason this game was too tough for me, after a while the enemy types become really though to deal with and the bosses have almost bullet-hell like patterns and attacks.You heal up by finding hearts on slain enemies and you get new abilities as you level-up and complete challenge rooms, but I still died over and over before getting to the third floor of the dungeon. That being said, I like how enemies use the same spells as you, it gives you an idea of what they're doing.
All and all, even if holding both left and right mouse buttons to auto-cast my two spells is a bit tedious and I rarely used the 1 and 2 keys because they didn't seem to trigger half the time, Runers is a great rogue like and a pretty fun spell-based twin stick shooter. The way the various menus and stat screens lay down exactly what your stats are and what your spells do is pretty fun and the runedex just calls you to craft them all.
