Puzzle Quest is a landmark series, turning the match 3 gem game into a deeper RPG system that could bring hours and hours…. and hours of entertainment. Others games have tried the formula but few have been able to reach the same level of excellence as the first few Puzzle Quest games in the series.
Rune Lord is a game that tackles the same type of RPGification of a match 3 game and comes at it from the point of a magical fantasy land. The goal is to clear 60 levels of rune matching to destory the Ice Golem. The story is extremely sparse but as you travel the land with your six colours of runes, you can match them in lines of three or more to generate magic for that colour. Following the Treasures of Montezuma series, if you match the same rune colours repeatedly, you’ll get a bonus for back to back matches and this can be helpful to achieve your goals or charge up the runes to launch their spells if you match them three times in a row. Some spells are like bombs exploding a radius around them whilst others trigger more points or turn runes to another colour. You’ll chase certain rune colours depending on the goal of the level you are in.
Some levels will have you battling a monster to kill it with attacks from your runes. Others are more score or “clear the board” focused. All of them come with a time limit though and this is where you’ll decide if Rune Lord is for you. The time limit across the entire game is extremely harsh. Thankfully as gems swap, you can keep moving to your next move and swap those too but this isn’t a game where you can think about your next move. It is about going at speed, forcing decisions and when you’ve got a chain reaction taking place sometimes that means you’ll need a bit of luck for things to fall into place. In the last few levels, luck plays too much of a factor because the time limits are so restrictive, you’ve just got to hope that your cascades of gems after clearing most of the board keeps your combo going and that feels a bit extreme.
To balance things out a little more in your favour, there is a small skill tree you can spend coins on to unlock skill improvements on. Three of the fourteen skills give you more time and I recommend getting those at any cost. Other upgrades make the rune spells more powerful and will become useful too. You can collect these coins by satisfying various optional challenges in addition to clearing the main goal for half of the levels. This extends out Rune Lord’s longevity as you’ll hit a brick wall by game design, not skill limit, so you’ll need to grind those coins and get some upgrades in to progress.
There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with Rune Lord but the time limit sucks most of the enjoyment out of the late game. By this point you’ll have frozen runes that need cracking before they can move, stone and rock walls that get in the way, and a guess into the unknown with what moves are coming next. I don’t mind games that require speed to match gems and proceed but the high expectations of the minimum pass rates will mean you’ll be stuck for the last 10 levels really slogging your way to completion. With little to no story, generic visuals and music and frustration mounting, the misbalanced approach drags the overall score of Rune Lord down for me. I discovered and played this game to unwind during Covid lockdowns when I needed a break from essential working and in the end it knackered me out. I had to pick it off in tiny pieces over time to make it manageable to play and not scream at the TV screen! Next time Alawar, a little more slack would go a long way.
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