Rune II. The worst games of 2019

At the beginning there was Rune – an action adventure game, originally released in 2000, which stole the hearts of players with the theme of Scandinavian mythology, a lot of brutality and solid gameplay mechanics. A year later, the title received an expansion pack and a console conversion, but that was the end of it. Until 2017, when the original creators of the series, Human Head studio, has unexpectedly announced a follow-up of their classic hit.

Rune II was created in pain. By following the development process, it was easy to notice that game designers were indecisive and confused. Even such a simple task like determining the final title of the game proved to be overwhelming for them. The sequel titled Rune: Ragnarock was announced. After some time the subtitle was dropped (the game was titled Rune), but six months before the final release developers have changed their minds once again and renamed the title to Rune II. The game was also supposed to use the early access service, but just before its release as an early access product, the developers have abandoned this idea and declared that they prefer to release a full version of the game later.

This chaotic mess and confusion brought us a game that has little in common with the magnificent first installment. While the first Rune was a linear action game, the continuation focused on such features as the open world, survival aspects and RPG-like character development. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver, mainly due to tedious and undemanding combat system, limited possibilities of character development and annoying survival features which rather irritated and disturbed than entertained.

Human Head practically bled to death by creating this hideous game – just one day after the release of Rune II the studio was closed down and its employees were taken over by Bethesda, where they will be creating more titles under the name of Roundhouse Studios. Let's hope those incoming titles will be more successful. Well, at least better than Fallout: 76.

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Eternity: The Last Unicorn

Here it is. The great winner. The worst-rated game of 2019. How did the Brazilian developer earn this award? Well, it wasn't caused by just a one single flaw, but rather a perfect mix of completely ruined game features and awful game mechanics – every component of the game was extremely ravaged. The Last Unicorn is an action RPG that tried to draw inspiration from such genres like metroidvania and soulslike, but in both cases it tremendously failed.

Character controls (you can play as an elf and a Viking, between whom you can switch at the designated points of the plot) are extremely lame. Fixed camera position will bring you tears of fury and frustration, for example, after moving to a new location the position of the camera changes and as a result main character is abruptly changing his/her rotation by returning to the previously visited area. The combat is extremely dull and the collision system is faulty and crippled – there were numerous moments when I received some damage even when the enemy wasn't in the attack range.

The gameplay was based on a huge amount of backtracking – the primitive main and side quests regularly forced me to run back and forth through the same boringly designed locations. Cliché story, full of plot holes could hardly justify these journeys. The amount of bugs (including such glitches that could crash the whole game) and budget visuals have only completed this gruesome experience.

Even if the game could shine technically and all glitches were fixed, Eternity: The Last Unicorn would still be a very flat, common representative of an overcrowded genre. Ironically, thanks to its devastating or rather disastrous quality, at least it managed to attract some attention and achieve something – the title of the worst game of 2019.

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